Justice Cherno Sulayman Jallow has told The Fatu Network the Constitutional Review Commission held it was always a possibility for the draft constitution to be rejected.
Members of the national assembly last month blocked the draft constitution from reaching the referendum stage.
CRC chairman Justice Cherno Sulayman Jallow on whether his commission saw the move coming said: “When you embark on a constitutional review process, you bear two things in mind: first you have to realise that it is a legal process on the one hand and on the other hand you have the political process and it involves a number of stakeholders.
“In our case, we were guided throughout the process by a law that was set down for us by the national assembly which was assented to by His Excellency the President of the republic. Now, we used those guiding principles and to make sure we sought opinion and made sure that we considered those opinions properly and incorporated those that we felt represented the views and aspirations of the Gambian people. So yes in a way, you could say that one could see this coming. It was always a possibility, we never discounted that out.
“But our responsibility was to discharge our mandate which was to review the 1997 constitution and write a new one and in so doing we followed the processes that were set out for us and we tried as best as we could to be as balanced as possible, looking at the international best practices and bearing in mind also the importance of ushering in a new constitution that could withstand the test of time because it makes no sense that every time you have a change of regime you embark on this process. It is costly.”
