Academic offers guidelines on charter rewrite

A leading advocate is calling for the charter rewrite to not be dominated by political parties and instead involve the public in the drafting process.

Gothom Arya, director of Mahidol University's Research Centre for Peace Building, issued an open letter Friday outlining his recommendations for the formation of the Constitution Drafting Assembly.

In the letter, he also aired his views on the issues that charter rewriters should tackle.

Under the governmentsponsored draft, the CDA is meant to comprise 99 members, of whom 77 are elected and 22 appointed.

Gothom countered that the CDA should have 150 to 200 members based on the population size of each province instead of just one member per province. However, he did not comment on the appointed members being based on a pool of academics.

"A larger numbers of elected CDA members would dilute partisanship by lessening the chance for political parties to fix the voting outcome," he said.

The Nation