A/HRC/18/46 V. The Constitutional Council, human rights and Parliament 55. The Constitutional Council was established under the Constitution to review the laws enacted by Parliament to ascertain their compatibility with the Constitution and thereby the fundamental freedoms and rights guaranteed by it and by international human rights treaties ratified by Cambodia. It consists of distinguished people drawn from various walks of public life. This is an innovative element of the Cambodian Constitution and a very welcome addition to the institutions designed to strengthen democracy. The Constitutional Council is a powerful body, at least on paper. Such a body for post-adoption review of the law does not exist in many countries. In many countries, is the constitutional court or the supreme court that has the power to declare a piece of legislation ultra vires of the constitution. The Council is composed of one president and eight members. The Council cannot examine any matter on its own initiative. Only the King, the President of the Senate, the President of the National Assembly, the Prime Minister, one quarter of the Senators, one tenth of the members of the National Assembly, or the Supreme Court can make a request to the Council to review the constitutionality of a law passed by Parliament. 56. In the exercise of its powers, the Cambodian Constitutional Council has delivered some decisions with far-reaching implications, such as its ruling on the Law on Aggravating Circumstances for Felonies in July 2007,5 drawing on international standards. However, the scope of its work is limited by the fact that private citizens have no direct opportunities to challenge the constitutionality of the laws enacted by Parliament. The citizens of Cambodia have to go through their Members of Parliament to the Council and the Members of Parliament seem to rarely exercise their powers to request the Council to review a piece of legislation that they themselves adopted in the first place. 57. Only a private citizen who is party to legal proceedings before a court of law can raise the question of the unconstitutionality of a piece of legislation or decisions of other State institutions including royal decrees, subdecrees and other administrative decisions, but even in this case it is up to the Supreme Court to refer the matter to the Council. The Supreme Court has not yet exercised this right even when it was called upon to do so in some recent court cases. The Council has very few cases before it for consideration. Given the passage of many laws and the controversy around them, some of the acts of Parliament or its internal regulations could have been reviewed by the Council. Although article 140 of the Constitution accords explicit powers to the Council to review the internal regulations of the National Assembly and the Senate before promulgation, the Council has not been as assertive and as active as it should be. It does not seem to have reviewed the constitutionality of some of the controversial provisions in the internal rules of the Assembly and the Senate before they were promulgated. The domination of the Cambodian People’s Party in the State machinery seems to have led to some self-censorship by the Council. 5 16 This law, passed in 2002, removed both the discretion that judges previously had to consider the age of an offender in mitigation and the obligation judges had to halve any prison sentence for persons under 18 years of age. The Constitutional Council, in 2007, ruled that the Law was constitutional but on the basis that the Law was not intended to abrogate the protections provided to child offenders in the 1992 Provisions Relating to the Judiciary and Criminal Law and Procedure Applicable in Cambodia during the Transitional Period (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia law), since that would have violated both the Constitution and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It further clarified in its decision that international human rights treaties to which Cambodia was party were part of domestic law and directly applicable by judges in the courts. (See A/HRC/7/56, paras. 24-26).