Constitution of Venezuela
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The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the current constitution of Venezuela. It was adopted in December 1999, replacing the 1961 Constitution which had been, of the 26 constitutions in use by the country since independence in 1811, the one that remained in force for the longest time.
Adoption
President Hugo Chávez was first elected under the 1961 constitution in the presidential election of 6 December 1998. One of his electoral promises was to organise a referendum asking the people if they wanted to convene a National Constituent Assembly. His very first decree as president was to order such a referendum, which took place on 19 April. The electorate were asked two questions – whether a constituent assembly should be convened, and whether it should follow the mechanisms proposed by the president. The "yes" vote in response to these two question totalled 92% and 86%, respectively.
Elections were then held, on 25 July, to elect 131 deputies to the Constituent Assembly, which convened and debated proposals during the remainder of 1999. The proposed constitution the assembly drafted was put to the electorate in another referendum on 15 December 1999, in which it was approved by a majority of 71.8%. The new constitution came into effect the following 20 December.
Text
First of all, the new constitution renamed the country from "Republic of Venezuela" to "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela", in honour of Simón Bolívar – largely at Chávez's personal insistence, and in spite of the initial reluctance of the constituent assembly's deputies, most of whom believed that the financial cost and bureaucratic fiddling involved in the change would be unwarranted.
The text of the constitution is an interesting hybrid of jurisprudential and political norms drawn from sources as wide as Simón Bolívar's writings on constitutionality and popular sovereignty, José Martí, the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui and Evgeny Pashukanis. It is essentially a Bolivarian-Marxist charter, incorporating elements of popular sovereignty (such as frequent referenda), social responsibilities, the right to rebel against injustice and the eternal independence of the republic from foreign domination.
Significant changes were made to the separation of powers. Instead of the more normal three branches of government, the Bolivarian Republic has five: executive, legislature, and judiciary, plus the electoral branch (poder electoral) and the citizens' branch (poder ciudadano). The electoral branch is headed by the National Electoral Council and is responsible for the independent oversight of all elections in the country; the citizens' branch, comprising the ombudsman (defensor del pueblo), the attorney general (fiscal general), and the comptroller general (contralor general), is responsible for representing and defending the citizens in their dealings with powers of the state.
Another significant change was to make the national legislature unicameral: a single-chamber National Assembly, instead of the previous arrangement with a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate.
The constitution allows the citizens to initiate a referendum about removing the current Head of State from power. Such a referendum was held in 2004, but it failed to receive majority support. See Venezuelan recall referendum, 2004.
External links
- Constitución de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela (html)
- Constitución de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela (pdf)
- Unofficial English translation (html)
