Activism, Featured - Wednesday, March 25, 2009 14:49 - 0 Comments

Judiciary Restored! A roadmap next!

This list of issues to consider is fetched from Emergency mailing list. Althogh I fully agree with the issues stated, there are some things that need to be added and prioritized. These are not necessarily in the order of importance and this e-mail is not structured very well, but hope it can serve as a starting point. Each one of these issues is very important, and we need someone to take it up.

1. Judiciary and police reforms:
This can be broken down into the following:
a. Getting rid of all new judges appointed after Nov 3 and ensuring that new judges are appointed through a proper process which prevents any political party from inducting its own chamchas. This is a very crucial but yet unfinished part of the lawyers’ movement’s agenda.
b. Developing a proper method of accountability for the judges because the existing SJC structure is flawed.
c. Reforming the lower judiciary.
d. Police reforms

2. Devolution:
This is very important because devolution has the potential to open up opportunities for ordinary citizens to enter electoral politics. Union councils are small, and you can contest elections even if you are not filthy rich. Once you have been a union councilor, you can gradually go on to contest elections for bigger constituencies and move up in politics.
Things to do: convince the media to have more constructive discussions on devolution, and promote the idea to the people at large, so that it becomes increasingly difficult for any government to roll it back.

3. Intra-party democracy:
This requires engaging with the media and political party workers at the grass roots to highlight this issue.

4. Demanding live debates on local radio:
Due to the wider reach of radio, and considering the fact that TV channels can generally only talk about national issues, there is a real need for local city/district radio stations to come up and hold live debates on local issues. During elections, the election commission should even arrange for regular structured debates at the local level for all constituencies. Continue…