Santiago Villaveces and Prakash Bastola at the Dialogue in Kathmandu, January 2009
Photo ©: Leena Rikkilä Tamang

In January 2009, International IDEA arranged a dialogue in Kathmandu on the security sector and its implications for the ongoing constitution-building process in Nepal. The meeting was attended mainly by members of the Constituent Assembly.

The question of how to address security agencies in the context of a constitution is often vexed. By security agencies, we often refer to the military, police, intelligence services, customs and border control. Yet it also includes oversight bodies such as the executive and legislature, civil society organizations, and justice and law enforcement institutions such as the judiciary and prisons. Other actors such as armed groups, militias and private firms influence the ways in which the security sector reacts to violence and is accountable to its actions.

Depending on how it is managed, the security sector can work either as an enabler or a disabler to democracy: it can either deepen the quality of democracy or it can hinder sound democratic norms and practices. For countries like Nepal, which are undergoing a transition from conflict, a comprehensive definition of the role of security agencies is required so as to guarantee basic building blocks for democracy.

Some of the issues discussed during the dialogue included:

• How to incorporate constitutional provisions that balance the need for access to justice and the right to personal security with the legitimate use of force.
• How to rethink the existing institutional arrangements in order to guarantee an effective oversight and governance of the security sector?
• How to frame the above within a definition of the current security needs for Nepal. These may very well involve not only the maintenance of public order and territorial integrity of the country, but also broader human security concerns.

Participants in the dialogue were interested to know how other countries handle these issues and what structures are in place (e.g. ombudsman, the role of the Attorney-General’s office, the role of the Prosecutor General, the role of Independent Police Commissions amongst others). A number of participants felt that many of the institutional arrangements and institutional mechanisms discussed have actually been in place in Nepal but their functioning and implementation has been compromised - the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) being an egregious example as one that needs to be further strengthened.

Accountability mechanisms, external oversight arrangements, the role of civil society in scrutiny, the role of the judicial system, the level of transparency of operations: these were all issues discussed at the meeting.

“Security is a cross-cutting theme in a constitution; do not box it only to the committee dealing with Security Institutions but look at it in a comprehensive way. Bill of rights and state of emergency limitations and controls, state restructuring and federalism, state financing, all these are pivotal in the definition of a sound security sector” argued International IDEA’s Santiago Villaveces.

For more information, see International IDEA’s publication Creating the New Constitution: Guide for Nepali Citizens (chapter 18, “National Security and Democracy”).

Nepal’s Constituent Assembly was convened in May 2008 and it is scheduled to conclude drafting the new constitution by the end of May 2010. The Constituent Assembly elections in April 2008 were part of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended a decade long Maoist insurgency.

The Dialogue was co-organized by International IDEA and the Alliance for Peace: www.afpnepal.org