Iceland’s ‘crowd-sourced’ constitution is dead
Posted on 29 March 2013    by Baldur Bjarnason (@fakebaldur)
http://studiotendra.com/2013/03/29/icelands-crowd-sourced-constitution-is-dead/

* late 2008 and early 2009: pots- and pans-banging crowds in Parliament Square in Reykjavík
* early 2009: new post-crash government that came to office
* Fewer than 37% percent voted in the election for the constitutional parliament.
* The next step should have been to put the draft to a committee that would then have solicited feedback from constitutional scholars, lawyers, and other experts. Parliament should have then spent several months of continuous work hammering out the gaps, loopholes, and wording of the document before presenting it to the nation. Instead the government put it in a drawer and sat on it for months.
* At first the goal was to put the completed constitution proposal to a referendum alongside the presidential election in June 2012.
* The only thing that the autumn 2012 constitutional referendum accomplished was to prove that the new constitution was dead. But that’s not how foreign media reported it.
* after the October 2012 referendum that some of the unsupportive academics stepped forward with critical comments on the bill

Democracy on ice: a post-mortem of the Icelandic constitution
Thorvaldur Gylfason 19 June 2013
https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/thorvaldur-gylfason/democracy-on-ice-post-mortem-of-icelandic-constitution