The Council of the Strategic Policy, debates and objections

Update

Al-Sumeria just released the last ver­sion of the draft doc­u­ment, which (accord­ing to the TV chan­nel) will be dis­cussed in the parliament. .….……

No time to trans­late the whole text of form­ing the National Coun­cil for the strate­gic pol­icy law drafted by Al-Iraqiya, but I hint to its few arti­cles below.

Al-Iraqiya List insists that the Par­lia­ment must approve the Coun­cil law before pro­ceed­ing to form the government’s cab­i­net, which means that Al-Iraqiya wants, first of all, to legit­imize the work of the coun­cil that is no less impor­tant than the the three pres­i­den­cies. It is expected that this issue will raise a rejec­tion from the “National Alliance”, [already for­mally rejected the draft law

How­ever, sources in Al-Iraqiya, said that the List had sub­mit­ted the request to the nego­ti­at­ing Com­mit­tee between the polit­i­cal blocs in the hope that the Law will take its way to the Par­lia­ment at a later date.

On his part, Maliki is no longer care about the many state­ments made by his rival, Iyad Allawi who sends mes­sages with dif­fer­ent objec­tives and goals. At the time it is not clear yet the direc­tion of the process of form­ing the National Coun­cil of the Strate­gic Policy.

It seems that the dif­fer­ences among the polit­i­cal blocs and coali­tions do not stop at the lim­its of the Council’s pow­ers only, but extended to include the most basic details such as the mech­a­nism of the sub­mis­sion, to the details of the author­ity and the duties of the Council.

Back to the text of the draft of the National Coun­cil for the Strate­gic Pol­icy, the authors [Al-Iraqiya] say that the aim is:

Achieve a national unity among the par­lia­men­tary blocs in accor­dance with the ini­tia­tive of the Pres­i­dent of Kur­dis­tan region, Mas­soud Barzani.

And they add:

Find a bal­ance between the leg­isla­tive, exec­u­tive and judi­ciary author­i­ties in the State’s Admin­is­tra­tion on the basis of full com­pli­ance with the Constitution.

Another para­graph explains the func­tion of the Council:

To eval­u­ate the per­for­mance of the judi­ciary author­ity in order to achieve jus­tice and to ensure its com­pli­ance with the Con­sti­tu­tion and laws to pro­mote the sta­bil­ity and security.

The above para­graph expected to raise objec­tion among all blocs, espe­cially that the judi­ciary sys­tem is com­pletely inde­pen­dent, accord­ing to Iraq’s con­sti­tu­tion and is not enti­tled to any interference.

It seems that the draft law on the National Coun­cil for Strate­gic Pol­icy, which was designed locally and with the help of the Amer­i­cans, to please Al-Iraqiya’s leader Iyad Allawi, after he was denied the right to form the gov­ern­ment, will not pass with­out fur­ther objec­tion and challenge.

It is clear from Al-Iraqiya’s draft ver­sion, that the List wants a coun­cil with ulti­mate pow­ers par­al­lel to these of the Coun­cil of Min­is­ters, and excluded from the points sys­tem adopted for gov­ern­ment posts, while the Shi­ite forces rep­re­sented by the “National Alliance” insists to give the coun­cil a con­sul­ta­tive sta­tus, applied to the points sys­tem, its deci­sion must be approved by 80% of its mem­bers which seems dif­fi­cult to achieve under the National Alliance’s dominance.

Per­haps the first signs of that com­plex­ity is a vari­a­tion on the con­cept of issues of the advi­sory nature and issues of con­sti­tu­tional char­ac­ters, mean­ing that the mem­bers of the “National Alliance” say that the fun­cion of the Pol­icy Coun­cil is based on the polit­i­cal con­sen­sus [Muhasasa], rather than the Con­sti­tu­tion. Accord­ingly, it is not per­mis­si­ble to frame what has agreed upon among the polit­i­cal blocs in a con­sti­tu­tional framework.

And went to more than that when they tied the author­ity of the Pres­i­dency of the Par­lia­ment to the func­tions of the Coun­cil of the Strate­gic Pol­icy, forc­ing the house speaker “Al-Nujaifi” to sub­mit the con­cept “the pres­i­dency of the Par­lia­ment” to the Fed­eral Court, in a ques­tion; if “Al-Nujaifi” is the head of the Par­lia­ment or the Pres­i­dent of the the Par­lia­ment Coun­cil. The response of the court came not in favor of the “NA” say­ing that the Con­sti­tu­tion rec­og­nizes that the house speaker is the head of the Parliament.

While the “NA” coali­tion mem­bers rec­og­nized the court’s deci­sion, they linked the pow­ers of the pres­i­dency of par­lia­ment to the pow­ers of the National Coun­cil for the strate­gic pol­icy, if Al-Iraqiya wants to expand the pow­ers of the house speaker. In the sense that they want to push in the direc­tion that if Al-Iraqiya insists on legit­imiz­ing the Coun­cil of the Strate­gic Pol­icy, then a con­sen­sus on the Parliament’s pres­i­dency should also be legit­imized. Con­se­quently, lim­its the house speaker’s [Osama Nujaifi] advan­tages of the pres­i­dency of the parliament.

With this devel­op­ments, Osama Al-Nujaifi com­mis­sioned a com­mit­tee formed by “Rafie Al-Issawi”-“Iraqiya List”, “Hasan Al-Sunaid”-“State of Law” and “Rose Nuri Shaways”-“Kurdistan Alliance” to pre­pare a draft law reg­u­lat­ing the work of the National Coun­cil for the Strate­gic Poli­cies to be sub­mit­ted to the Pres­i­dent of the Repub­lic, to the Prime Min­is­ter, and then pre­sented to the Par­lia­ment for approval. Which means that the draft law put for­ward by Al-Iraqiya is sub­ject to rejec­tion and re-drafting even before debated among the polit­i­cal blocs in the Parliament.