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Nepal's Constitution
Why do countries have an interim Constitution?
This may be because they have no existing constitution (which may happen when a new country is created, like East Timor), or because of a long period of lack of government (which has been the experience of Somalia). In Iraq and Afghanistan where one regime was overthrown by international action, the old constitutions did not seem appropriate to the radically new situation but there was a need for some constitutional framework while a new constitution was prepared. In Afghanistan the temporary constitution was negotiated at a UN sponsored international conference. For Iraq a temporary constitution was essentially prepared by the USA. In South Africa in the early 1990s there was a radical change in the political scene, after the recognition by the previously dominant white community that it would have to abandon the system of apartheid. But there was agreement that legal continuity should be respected - so the old, racist, constitution's provisions were used to enact a new, interim constitution that had been carefully negotiated by the parties. The interim constitution provided for the process of preparing the final constitution.
It may be that the existing constitution does not provide a sufficiently firm basis for the future, but parties are unable to accept that it should simply be amended. That was the position in Nepal in 2006.
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