CHAPTER 4. CONSTITUTIONAL BACKGROUND. A. B. C. D.
HISTORY. FORMATION OF PARLIAMENT. PRIMARY AND SUBORDINATE DOMESTIC LEGISLATION. CHECKS AND BALANCES.
A. History.
On July 16, 1931, a few months after His Corona tion, incumbent Emperor Haile Sellassie I granted to the people of Ethiopia the first written Constitution in the history of the 3,000 year old Empire. A quarter of a century later, on November 4, 1955, the silver jubilee anniversary of the Coronation, His Imperial Majesty promulgated, with the approval of the Par liament which had been first established by the Con stitution of 1931, the Revised Constitution of 1955 which is in effect today. Specific provision is made therein for the prospective continuation of the estab lished Constitutional Monarchy through the incumbent male dynastic line that traces its ancestry back to the historical union of the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba and Biblical King Solomon of Jerusalem. Since a Constitution is the basic foundation of the legal system of a country, the full text of the Revised Constitution of 1955 is reproduced in Appendix A, supra. The first Ethiopian Constitution of 1931 resembled in part that of the Japanese Empire of 1889, which in turn was similar to the Constitution of 1871 of the German Empire. The Ethiopian Revised Constitution of 1955 is a liberal modification of the 1931 Constitu tion with the addition of many modern concepts such