Senegal is an African country located on the shores of the Atlantic ocean, sharing a border with Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. The population of this country is approx 1,88,47,000 with 1,96,722 square kilometers area. Ethnically, no one is the majority, rather Senegal is home to many communities. For colonial reasons, the official language is French, although in reality about minimum 7 different languages are spoken. The only similarity is in religion, about 97% are Muslims. But the hopeful aspect is that Senegal is a secular state.
Any discrimnation, or based on ethnicity or religion is illegal, so do regional propaganda. In Senegal, before 15, more than 9% girls become the victims of child marriage, also 32% before becoming 18 years old. Senegal constitution bans forced marriage.
These are positive aspects. Now let's discuss the negative aspects.
No one over the age of 75 is eligible to be president. This is strange. People in government jobs around the world usually start working before the age of 30, and usually retire with a pension at the age of 60. But politicians spend their entire lives in politics, spending their hard-earned money, and may not come to power before they are 60 or 75 years old. Setting an upper age limit for politicians is the highest level of misconduct.
Admirable Articles of Senegal's Constitution
Article 5
Any act of racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination, as well as any regionalist propaganda infringing the internal security of the State or the territorial integrity of the Republic is punished by the law.
Article 18
Forced marriage is a violation of individual liberty. It is forbidden and punished within the conditions established by the law.
Article 25
Everyone has the right to work and the right to seek employment. No one may be impeded in their work for reason of their origins, of their sex, of their opinions, of their political choices or of their beliefs. The worker may affiliate with a union and defend their rights through union action.
Any discrimination between men and women in employment, salary and taxation is forbidden.
The freedom to create labor or professional associations is recognized to all workers.
The right to strike is recognized. It is exercised within the framework of the laws which govern it. It may not in any case infringe the freedom to work, or place the enterprise in peril.
Every worker participates, by the intermediary of his delegates, in the determination of the conditions of work in the enterprise. The State sees to sanitary and humane conditions in the places of work.
Specific laws establish the conditions of assistance and of protection which the State and the enterprise accord to the workers.
Article 26
The President of the Republic is elected by direct universal suffrage and by the absolute majority of the suffrage expressed.
Facts of Senegal's Constitution
Preamble (Part of it)
The sovereign People of Senegal,
PROFOUNDLY attached to their fundamental cultural values which constitutes the cement of the national unity;
ATTACHED to the ideal of African unity;
AFFIRM:
● their adhesion to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 and to the international instruments adopted by the Organization of the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity, notably the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man of 10 December 1948, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination with Regard to Women of 18 December 1979, the Convention relative to the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989 and the African Charter of the Rights of Man and of Peoples of 27 June 1981;
● their attachment to transparency in the conduct and management of public affairs as well as to the principle of good governance;
PROCLAIM:
● the intangible principle of the integrity of the national territory and of the national unity within respect for the cultural specificities of all the components of the Nation;
Approve and adopt this Constitution of which the Preamble is an integral part.
Article 28
Any candidate to the Presidency of the Republic must be exclusively of Senegalese nationality, enjoying his civil and political rights, be thiry-five (35) years of age at least and seventy-five (75) years at most the day of the ballot. He must know how to write, to read and to fluently speak the official language.
Article 60
Any deputy who resigns from his party in the course of legislature is
automatically relieved of his mandate. He is replaced within the
conditions determined by an organic law.
