Eirikur Bergmann: Iceland's government is on the point of collapse as angry protesters stake out the parliament in Reykjavik Protesters gather in Reykjavik as members of parliament gathered for their first session of the new year. Photograph: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP While Barack Obama was being sworn in to office on Capitol Hill yesterday, the people of Iceland were starting the first revolution in the history of the republic. The word "revolution" might sound a bit of an overstatement, but given the calm temperament that usually prevails in Icelandic politics, the unfolding events represent, at the very least, a revolution in political activism. Four months after the collapse of Iceland's entire financial system, no one has accepted any responsibility. The governor of the central bank blames the risk-seeking bankers, the bankers blame the government and the prime minister attributes the whole crisis to the international credit crunch. It started in October with peaceful demonstrations. Yesterday parliament resumed for the first time after Christmas.
Stjórnlagaráð 2011 - English The Constitutional Council presented the Speaker of Althingi, Mrs. Ásta Ragnheidur Jóhannesdottir, with the bill for a new constitution in Idnó, today (Download PDF version). The bill was unanimously approved by all delegates, at the last meeting of the Council, on Wednesday 27 July 2011. The bill assumes that from now on, changes to the constitution will be submitted to a vote by all who are eligible to vote in Iceland, for either approval or rejection. The bill starts with a prologue and contains a total of 114 articles in 9 chapters. The main themes which the Constitutional Council has observed during its work have been these three: Distribution of power, transparency and responsibility. The Chapter on Human Rights has been revised and is now called Human Rights and Nature. During the revision of the constitution, emphasis was put on the distribution of power and to increase the separation between the legislative power and the executive power.
Lessons from Iceland Image from Democracy 2.0: Iceland crowdsources new constitution June 11 2011 | ROAR Magazine In just three years, Iceland went from collapse to revolution and back to growth. What can Spain and Greece learn from the Icelandic experience and its embrace of direct democracy? Just two or three years after its economy and government collapsed, Iceland is bouncing back with remarkable strength. Now, in an historically unprecedented move, the government has decided to draft a new constitution with the online input of its citizens — essentially crowdsourcing the creation of Iceland’s real democracy. How did Iceland get from there to here? Back in 2009, months after the greatest banking collapse in economic history, the people of Iceland took to the streets en masse to denounce the reckless bankers who had caused the crisis and the clueless politicians who had allowed it to develop. Wade helps us understand what not to do.
The Single Transferable Vote Where is STV used? • All elections in the Republic of Ireland, except elections for the presidency and by-elections which are both conducted using the Alternative Vote. • Assembly, European and local government elections in Northern Ireland. • Local elections in Scotland, from 2007. • The Australian Senate. • The Tasmanian House of Assembly. • The indirect elections to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's federal Parliament. • All elections in Malta. • Various local authorities in New Zealand. • Many UK student unions (it is promoted by the National Union of Students as the fairest electoral system), the Church of England and many other private organisations. How does the Single Transferable Vote work? The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a form of proportional representation which uses preferential voting in multi-member constituencies. Pros and cons of the Single Transferable Vote Further information
Iceland's bizarre Icesave referendum | Alda Sigmundsdóttir This past weekend, the people of Iceland went to the polls in a referendum to vote on whether a deal should be passed to repay the British and Dutch governments for deposits lost in the Icesave online savings accounts when Iceland's Landsbanki collapsed. As the international media flocked to Iceland in the lead-up to the referendum, the phrase "theatre of the absurd" occurred. There seemed to be a popular misconception that the referendum was about far more serious things than it actually was – such as whether Iceland planned to repay the Icesave debt at all. In fact, Icelandic authorities had already committed to repaying the minimum deposit amount for each Icesave online account – the deal being voted on in the referendum merely concerned the terms of the repayment. However, what made the referendum – the first in the history of the Republic of Iceland – particularly bizarre was that there was already a deal on the table that was marginally better than the one being voted on.
Main index for Voting matters — To advance the understanding of preferential voting systems These pages provide an electronic copy of the technical publication of the McDougall Trust called Voting matters — To advance the understanding of preferential voting systems. For simplicity, the authorative copy of Voting matters is the printed copy. The early individual articles appear here in HTML, while the later ones are in PDF. Hence only the PDF version can be taken as being that same as the printed copy. Readers are reminded that views expressed in Voting matters by contributors do not necessarily reflect those of the McDougall Trust. Note that Issues 1–16 were published by the Electoral Reform Society. Issues 1–16 are available in both PDF and HTML. For Issues 17 onwards, PDF is available for each issue and also for the individual articles.
Why Iceland Should Be in the News, But Is Not Picture credit: may15internationalorganization.blogspot An Italian radio program's story about Iceland’s on-going revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world. Americans may remember that at the start of the 2008 financial crisis, Iceland literally went bankrupt. The reasons were mentioned only in passing, and since then, this little-known member of the European Union fell back into oblivion. As one European country after another fails or risks failing, imperiling the Euro, with repercussions for the entire world, the last thing the powers that be want is for Iceland to become an example. Five years of a pure neo-liberal regime had made Iceland, (population 320 thousand, no army), one of the richest countries in the world. Contrary to what could be expected, the crisis resulted in Icelanders recovering their sovereign rights, through a process of direct participatory democracy that eventually led to a new Constitution.
Hope from below: composing the commons in Iceland Iceland's fate epitomizes the tragedy of ‘constitutional democracies’ as they have been variously practiced and imposed in recent times: whereby the writing of a constitution by the people is considered the revolutionary exception, and not the rule. Never before has a ‘peacetime’ state constitution been drafted by an Assembly of ordinary citizens. Never before has a constitution’s fundamental values framework been ‘crowd-sourced’. Never before has a constitution been produced under the intense gaze of a population, scrutinising each draft as it is uploaded onto a website, watching meetings beamed live on the internet, with publics relaying feedback for improvement in real time. Never before has so much been at stake in the peacetime re-drafting of a constitution in such circumstances, and never before have citizens had such a stake in the process of its creation. In what follows I hope to make up for the faintly patronising tone struck by other accounts dealing with this event.
Icelandopenconstitution.mov Constitutional Changes in Iceland by JOSÉ M. TIRADO To some, it may not look like much. After the Pots and Pans Revolution, Icelanders demanded that some future safeguards be created to ensure another financial collapse is averted and that in the future, those responsible would be punished, or dissuaded from playing the high stakes poker with the entire nation’s economic resources, among other demands. 1. Maybe the most essential of the proposals, the people chose to go with the new Constitution, one which will be more equitable, enshrining animal rights, protecting natural resources, and more open to popular amending. 2. Overwhelmingly, Icelanders have declared, hands down, their opposition to the “octopus” of families who already dominate the country’s main resource, fish, and stated that those remaining natural resources are the patrimony of all Icelanders. 3. 4. Simply put, this refers to election of individuals vs parties. 5. 6. This item ranks next in importance. Rev.
Iceland's open-door government After the recent economic crash, many governments had to overhaul both financial structure and fiscal regulation. The majority, including the US government, formed a plan of attack using the same bureaucratic and economic venues in use for centuries. Politicians come to the table with plans and ideas based on their own thinking and research. Some use these opportunities to filter in their own agenda, hidden in layers of jargon and political colloquial, to be reviewed and passed (or passed on) by a body of politicians behind closed doors. With this kind of complicated maneuvering, those that want to know what is going on in their government and why changes are taking place often have to sift through pages of jargon to get to the meaning. The problem lies in the process through which political action takes place--a process largely hidden from the eyes and ears of the people. Iceland, on the other hand, has taken a bold and very public approach. Why would the government do this?