The group had been working on the draft since April and posted its work on the Internet, allowing hundreds of other citizens to give their feedback on the project via the committee’s website and on social networks such as Facebook.
“The reaction from the public was very important. And many of the members were incredibly active in responding to the comment that came through,” Salvor Nordal, the head of the elected committee of citizens from all walks of life, told reporters.
Katrin Oddsdottir, a lawyer who had shared her experience on the committee through micro-blogging site Twitter, said she believed the public’s input was “what mattered the most” in preparing the draft.
“What I learned is that people can be trusted. We put all our things online and attempted to read, listen and understand and I think that made the biggest difference in our job and made our work so so so much better,” she said.
Iceland’s constitution was barely adapted from Denmark’s when the island nation gained independence from the Scandinavian kingdom in 1944.
“Since then, a holistic re-examination of the constitution has always been on the agenda, but always halted because of political infighting in the parliament,” committee member Eirikur Bergmann, a political science professor, said.