Talk:Constitution of the Republic of Belarus

1996 or 2004 version?
The current text has 27 November 1996 written as the date at the bottom. So the comments at the top about 2004 seem to be contradicted. Boud (talk) 23:42, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

The 1994 version appears to be at https://web.archive.org/web/20070512063656/http://www.servat.unibe.ch/law/icl/bo00000_.html and is also here at Constitution of the Republic of Belarus (1994) So clearly this version is not the 1994 version.
 * Article 97 of the unibe.ch archive says (1) The President shall be elected directly by the people of the Republic of Belarus. The President's term of office shall be five years. The same person may be President for no more than two terms.;
 * Article 97 of Constitution of the Republic of Belarus (1994) says The President shall be elected directly by the people of the Republic of Belarus. The President's term of office shall be five years. The same person may be President for no more than two terms.; (almost the same, but with "(1)"); while
 * Article 81 sentence 1 of the this Wikisource page says The President shall be elected directly by the people of the Republic of Belarus for a term of office of five years by universal, free, equal, direct and secret ballot. with no mention of term limits.

The 2004 version is available in Russian at www.pravo.by and in Belarusian at zakanadustva.narod.ru and appears to match the text of this Wikisource article, e.g. Article 81 appears semantically correct (not necessarily the official English translation, though). So it looks very much like the "(2004)" date of the constitution is correct, or at least close to being correct.

Regarding the "1996 signature" at the bottom, this is given in the www.pravo.by URL. So despite it being confusing, it appears to be, in a legal sense, the text that closes the document.

TODO: Regarding the text about this being an official translation from 1996 and 1997 - this remains to be verified. It could again be that despite this being the 2004 version, the official document for the 2004 version says nothing about it having been updated to 2004. (It would be like adding a comment here and writing the date 1 May 2002 even though in reality today's date/time is 01:39, 13 August 2023 (UTC).) Some sort of a Wikivoice note to warn the reader about this would seem useful to me, though I'm not sure how that should be done. Boud (talk) 01:39, 13 August 2023 (UTC)