This report is issued by the UN RCO with inputs from its UN Field Coordination Offices and other partners and sources. The report covers March 2014. The next report will be issued the first week of May 2014.
CONTEXT
Political update
The adoption of the Constituent Assembly‘s (CA) rules of procedure marked an important step towards the resumption of constitution drafting. The rules provide for five committees in the second CA, the most powerful of which being the Political Dialogue and Consensus Committee. This committee will be responsible for forging political consensus from both inside and outside the CA. The other committees will be the Study and Determination Committee (to identify the agreements of the first CA), the Constitution Drafting Committee, the Civil Relations and Constitution Suggestion Committee (to be involved in public dialogue) and the Capacity Building and Resource Management Committee. However, constitution-writing work cannot resume until all members and chairpersons of the committees have been selected. To date, all members of the committees have been appointed though the chair of two committees still remains to be decided. In addition, proposals put forward by both the Nepali Congress (NC) and Communist Party of Nepal–Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) suggesting the power of the party whip in the second CA be strengthened while inter-party caucuses be weakened or removed, were dropped, resulting in a high degree of consensus in adopting the new regulations, with the ‗royalist‘ Rastriya Prajatantra Party–Nepal (RPP-N) being the principal dissenting party. At the same time, the government has released its Common Minimum Programme, making its top priority the completion of the constitution within one year while the CA has voted to "own" the achievements of the first CA