Itineraries of an idea

This Special Issue represents another step in the already quite long history of the idea of a constitutional convention for Cyprus.It all began, so to say, in December 2004, when I was invited to an academic conference in Athens and asked to present a paper on possible lessons for Cyprus from the Swiss experience.After showing that the Annan Plan, despite its wording and pretension, had little if anything in common with Swiss federalism and democracy, I recalled the constitutional lessons we learnt in the 1970s when a new canton-Jura-was added to the Swiss Confederation and ended by mentioning the idea of a constitutional convention as a possible means to draft a new and democratic constitution for Cyprus.The immediate reaction was harshly negative.Complacent smiles politely told me that I had totally ignored the Cyprus problem, which I could not, and still cannot, deny.During the summer of 2005, an eight-member International Expert Panel 1 convened by the (Greek) Committee for a European Solution for Cyprus worked out a piece entitled 'A Principled Basis for a Just and Lasting Cyprus Settlement in the Light of European and International Law'.Slowly, after endless and thorny discussions in the Panel, the convention idea made headway, gained some support and was finally presented as 'the way forward' to possibly solve the Cyprus problem.The paper was first presented in September 2005 to the political leaders and the media in Cyprus and then formally submitted to the European Parliament in October 2005.Again, especially in Brussels, I had the impression that this thing called a constitutional convention aroused considerable suspicion and incomprehension.Feeling that this suspicion might have stemmed from the fact that the International Expert Panel did not have representatives of the Turkish Cypriot and Turkish side, the Centre for Research on Direct Democracy (c2d) organized an academic workshop in Geneva in June 2006 with participants representing all parties to the Cyprus conflict: Greece and Turkey, England and the USA, the two main Cypriot communities and Switzerland as a neutral chair

Convention · Law and economics · Political science · Sociology · Cyprus History, Politics, Society · Law · Political Systems and Governance · Post-Soviet Geopolitical Dynamics

• Cypriot-led, Cypriot-owned’

  Michális S Michael•Australian Journal Of International…•2013

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