Constitution of the Fiji Islands

The Constitution of the Republic of the Fiji Islands dates from 1997. It is Fiji's third Constitution. The first, adopted in 1970 upon independence, was abrogated following two military coups in 1987. A second constitution was adopted in 1990. Its discriminatory provisions, which reserved the office of Prime Minister and a built-in majority in the House of Representatives for indigenous Fijians (although they were at that time a minority of the population) proved very unpopular with the Indo-Fijian community, which comprised almost half the country's population, and in the mid-1990s the government agreed that it should be rewritten.