Archive of world constitutions on Google aids new countries building systems of elected government

Google launches online constitution archive | Democracy, elections and voting at Democracy Chronicles

AFP

Launching the new site —- www.constituteproject.org —- in New York, Google officials said the aim was to help people drafting constitutions to see what other countries have done in the past. “We wanted to take the physical constitutions and we wanted to have them organised online, make them universally available online and make them useful for all the different governments going through a constitutional process,” Google Ideas director Jared Cohen said.

“These constitutions and government documents represent an important opportunity for these countries,” he added.
The site was drawn up with the assistance of academics associated with the Comparative Constitutions Project(CCP). They formulated the idea for the site in 2008 after observing constitutional reform in Iraq and Afghanistan and realizing that there was no central resource detailing basic constitutional provisions. “A common result … is a haphazard and accidental cobbling together of constitutional elements from other countries,” the CCP said. Cohen said between five and seven constitutions were drafted each year in different parts of the world.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2013-09-google-online-constitution-archive.html