Haitham al-Maleh: Constitutional Committee meetings is a betrayal

Haitham al-Maleh the head of the Syrian opposition coalition’s legal department, who has resigned earlier this year, said that participating in the Constitutional Committee, which holds its first meeting at late October, is a “betrayal”.

In exclusive statements to North-Press, al-Maleh answered questions about the composition of the Commission and his expectations regarding what it will result in, underestimating the value of this step and its impact on the course of the situation in Syria, saying that there is no value of laws, because the authority is above the law.

Al-Maleh pointed out that he had spent more than 60 years of his life in works of law, therefore, legal prosecution of things ia of a high priority for him. He said: “In the judiciary, if one of the parties of the case makes a financial payment that has nothing to do with the content of the case; we usually say about this payment as unproductive payment, hence I would like to say that in Syria our problem is not a problem of laws”.

He explained: “Since the days of the French Mandate after World War I, we had a constitution of which we had set by ourselves, and the colonial state could not impose a constitution on the Syrians, nor a single article of it. After independence, we had a constitution and Hafez al-Assad, who seized power upon a military coup, had wrote 1973 constitution on his own, and then the son who has been his predecessor, wrote 2012 constitution, so Syria was not devoid of a constitution. Is it a matter of a constitution as the Syrian saw it? Of course not.”

He continued: “Since Hafez al-Assad came to power through a military coup, he ran the state outside the constitution and outside the laws and institutions; in this case, such an authority is called a failed authority, and this is what I was saying before the revolution that we have a constitution and laws in the books, those books are on the shelf, i.e. nothing has been applied.”

“Therefore, laws, including international treaties, are worthless because power is above the law, and I say so due to my experience in practicing my work,” al-Maleh said.

He went on to say: “The constitutional jurisprudence in the world – not Syria – says that it is the people who form their constitutions through their legitimate representatives, i.e. through election, unlike the Syrian people, who have not elected a body or a committee to draw up their constitution and they cannot do that now because of war and the destruction strategy which is  practiced by Bashar al-Assad, in addition to the displacement of more than half of the Syrian people and occupying Syria by outside forces, and the small area of the Syrian geography that is under Bashar’s control. “

He stated that the document (Geneva 1) speaks of steps. First, the formation of a transitional governing body with all executive powers, including the powers of the President, which means delegitimize Bashar al-Assad, of which it has been already fallen with the outbreak of the revolution. The governing body is tasked with forming a transitional government and calling for the election of a constitution-making body. There are also confidence-building provisions in the Security Council resolution.

Moreover, al-Maleh stressed that Bashar al-Assad neither implemented all the provisions in Geneva 1 nor others. Thus, his regime is called a rogue regime.

He said that he had written to Staffan de Mistura (the former UN envoy to Syria) a memorandum warning him against the consequence of engaging with  the constitution and elections, “I told him that all parties and blocs do not represent 5% of the Syrian people, I also warned the coalition not to go to the formation of the constitutional committee; because that represents a kind of betrayal,” he said.