She pulls a tome off her shelf and leafs through it to find some fine print that defines political bodies as organisations that "promote or prepare candidates for elections", under which definition Falun Gong is not a political body in Hong Kong, at least for the present.
Others include whether to keep a 25percentt quota for women in provincial councils; whether to ban the depiction of religious figures and symbols in campaign materials; and whether to switch to an open list system of elections, under which voters can choose individual candidates rather than parties.
The laws define new election procedures under which a president is elected by a majority in a popular vote, regardless of turnout, in a country where the opposition may boycott the polls.
It repealed the direct election law under which the prime minister is elected on a separate ballot -- a quasi-presidential, quasi-parliamentary system that did not function well.
But here, too, a moderate beginning would be sensible.Mrs Timoshenko was also against the constitutional reforms agreed with Mr Kuchma during the election crisis, under which many functions hitherto performed by the president are to be transferred to parliament (and thus to a future prime minister).
By contrast, until recently Arizona was one of only a few states with a "clean elections" law, under which candidates who had achieved a nominal level of funding would receive funding from the state to match their opponents dollar for dollar.
The report's authors call for a pre-election agreement to place a cap on overall numbers at around 550 and to agree a new formula – based on election vote share – under which the size of the upper house will be managed downwards over coming parliaments.
(Some Mexican streets still bear the name "Effective Suffrage, No Re-election", the slogan under which the country rose in revolution in 1910 against Porfirio Díaz, whose 30-year rule included seven consecutive terms).Critics of this trend say that incumbents have an even greater advantage over opponents than they have in, say, the United States.
There is one other reform which ministers should examine after the election: the Dutch scheme under which anyone who has been unemployed for two years is guaranteed a job in the community.
The reason that the idea of this Kabuki dance was entertained is an anomaly in the otherwise excellent public-finance provision of the Presidential Election Campaign Fund Act, under which each of the major candidates for President is given a check, financed by citizens who have ticked off boxes on their income-tax returns, with which to conduct his general-election campaign.
