Max Planck Foundation organised capacity building workshop in Pretoria within the project “Constitutional Support in Sudan”
From 4–7 April 2016 the Max Planck Foundation delivered its seventh workshop on “Design and Implementation of a Decentralised Constitutional System: Interrelationship between Levels of Government” to an inclusive group of 29 Sudanese high-level representatives of various political parties. This project is aimed at supporting the Sudanese commitments towards a future constitutional process. The participants united the various political viewpoints that exist regarding the different options for the future constitutional order in Sudan as the group combined representatives of the government and the major opposition political parties, the regions and civil society.
While the previous six workshops were conducted in Khartoum, Sudan, the Max Planck Foundation convened this workshop in Pretoria, South Africa, in partnership with the SARChI Professorship in International Constitutional Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria. Holding the workshop outside of Khartoum, Sudan, brought additional benefits to the workshop’s outcome as the participants were also able to spend time with each other outside the formal sessions of the workshop for continued open and free discussions in the evenings, mornings and throughout the day. Topic-wise this workshop covered the design and implementation of a decentralised constitutional system with a special focus on the interrelationship between the various levels of government. As the previous workshops, also several international and national Sudanese experts supported this workshop besides the experts and research fellows of the Max Planck Foundation.
Beside the capacity building aspects, the overall program aims at building trust and confidence amongst the Sudanese stakeholders by encouraging discussions on the technical legal aspects of constitutional processes across party political lines.