Will Franklin is looking at Bhutan’s Freedom House ranking, the king’s policies, and the newly proposed constitution. Here is the entire thing in PDF.

He notes:

Bhutan’s proposed constitution is ambitious, bordering on too ambitious. The beauty of the American Constitution is its relative simplicity, which has helped it stand the test of time.

Bhutan’s is certainly more manageable than the voluminous phone book known as the European Union constitution, but it still might face some minor problems due to its broad nature.

For example, preventing “unlawful attacks on honour and reputation” might conflict with the protection of freedom of speech. There are several areas where clear contradictions emerge, but ultimately it seems on the right track.

Secondly, the draft includes far more than the enumeration of rights; it mentions environmental issues like biodiversity and pollution; it promises public financing of political campaigns; and it even declares, “The State shall provide free access to basic public health services in both modern and traditional medicines.”

In short, Bhutan’s draft constitution is perhaps slightly too expansive, and it could be trimmed here and there, but reading through it often seems like an American civics lesson. It seems, at least, that the document is a genuine and good-faith effort on the part of Wangchuk to smoothly introduce democracy to his country.

Overall, the flaws in the constitution are minimal; if Wangchuk can convince his people to accept it (an irony in and of itself), Bhutan is on its way to becoming truly free and democratic. Another truly ambitious and respectable aspect of the reform is that the draft is “now being sent to all 530,000 adult citizens for their views.”

While the first joking thought that comes to mind is “socialist utopia,” the second is that these provisions in the constitution represent what Bhutan’s monarchy already does. Therefore, the vote for implementation will be two-fold: one for democratization, and the second as a referendum on the king’s rule as a whole, in fact their entire way of life.

For this it will be even more interesting to see how the referendum turns out. If the constitution is approved, it will show a confidence in the king’s previous rule and set a similar path for how the country is to be governed democratically in the near future.