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What is a Constitution?


View this page in Nepali.

A Constitution is the basic law of a country. It creates the government, lays down the main rules for the operation of that government, and provides for the protection of the rights of the people, and for bodies designed to ensure that government is effective, not corrupt, and is accountable to the people.

This simple definition does not do full justice to the importance that a constitution can have in the life of a country. How important a place may depend on other things like:
  • How was the constitution made? Are the people aware of it and do they feel it belongs to them and matters to them? This may depend on how much the people were involved in making the constitution.
  • Do people actually use it? Do they rely on it when making claims against government, do they use it as a guide to what they can expect from government and even for what their own duties are?
  • Do political parties and other people in public life take the constitution seriously?
Someone described as constitution as "the instruction book for how things work" (this is in a website about the possibility of having a constitution for the Northern Territory of Australia)

If you want to know more about what a constitution deals with you can read a short summary of the Interim Constitution of Nepal in Nepali or English. If you click here you can go to a simple list of the main parts of that Constitution which will give you a rough idea of what it is about.

There are various websites that discuss in simple terms what constitutions are, especially relating them to the circumstances of particular countries. For example:

The website of the South African Constitutional Court

The House of Representatives of the Australian Parliament
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