Tunisian President Kais Saied confirmed on Tuesday that Islam will not be included as a “state religion” in the new Constitution which he will submit to a referendum on July 25.
“In the next Constitution of Tunisia, we will not speak of a State whose religion is Islam but (of Tunisia’s membership) of an Umma (nation) whose religion is Islam. The Umma and the state are two different things,” Saied told reporters at Tunis airport.
Mr. Saied was given Monday a draft of a new Constitution which he must validate before submitting it to a referendum on July 25, the day of the 1st anniversary of the coup by which he had assumed full powers.
Sadok Belaïd, the lawyer who heads the commission responsible for drafting this text, said in an interview with AFP on June 6 that he would present to the president a draft charter expunged from any reference to Islam, to combat Islamist-inspired parties like Ennahdha, sparking heated debate in the country.
The first article of the current Constitution adopted with great fanfare in 2014, three years after the fall of the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine ben Ali, stipulates, like that of 1959, that Tunisia “is a free, independent and sovereign state, Islam is its religion, Arabic its language and the Republic its regime . In its preamble, the 2014 Constitution evokes “the cultural and civilizational belonging (of the Tunisian people) to the Arab and Islamic Umma” and its “Arab and Islamic identity” .
The new Constitution must replace that of 2014 which had established a hybrid system source of recurring conflicts between the executive and legislative branches.
The opposition and human rights organizations accuse Mr. Saied of trying to pass a text tailor-made for him. Asked Tuesday about the nature of the system of government that will be established by the new Constitution, Mr. Saied kicked into touch.
“Whether it is a presidential or parliamentary system is not the question. What matters is that the people have sovereignty. The rest is about functions and not powers”, a- he said. “There is the legislative function, the executive function and the judicial function and a separation between them,” he added.
