Nairobi, Kenya - Kenya's parliament has unanimously passed a draft constitution that is one of several key reforms experts say are needed to avoid a repeat of political violence that shook the country after the disputed 2007 election.

Kenya's presidency has enormous powers that are largely unchecked. Critics say that led to abuses of power that are believed to have fueled the post-election violence that killed more than 1,000 people.

President Mwai Kibaki, who is not eligible to run for re-election, supports the new draft that proposes several checks on presidential powers.

Parliament's vote late Thursday sets the stage for Kenya to go to a referendum on the draft charter within 90 days, marking the final steps in a decades-long process to rewrite the constitution.

This will be only the second time the East African nation will hold a referendum since gaining independence from Britain in 1963.

Debate over the past two days in Kenya's National Assembly was sometimes acrimonious as lawmakers tried to amend the draft prepared by a government-appointed panel of legal experts.

"The threat now that lies ahead is that the politicians are going back to the field and if they carry the kind of confusion that they have displayed to the public then the referendum is likely to be chaotic and there are chances that we might lose this draft in the public vote later in the year," Kithure Kindiki, a law lecturer at the University of Nairobi, said Friday.

Under the current constitution, the president is a lawmaker as well as head of state and government, and critics say there are few checks on presidential powers.

The draft charter passed by parliament requires that Cabinet and other presidential appointees be vetted by the National Assembly, something that does not happen under the current constitution. Among other major proposals, the draft charter introduces a Supreme Court for the first time and allows dual citizenship. It also provides for reintroducing elected county governments.

"Is it a better document than the one we have today? The majority of the provisions of this (draft) constitution are much better than what we have today," Prime Minister Raila Odinga said before lawmakers voted on the entire document.

More than 1,000 people were killed and 600,000 forced from their homes after Kibaki was declared winner of the December 2007 poll. Odinga's then-opposition party claimed the vote was rigged, leading to two months of upheavals. Odinga was later made prime minister under a power-sharing deal that ended the violence.

Kibaki and Odinga agreed to form the panel of Kenyan and other African legal experts that came up with the latest draft as part of a reform package pegged to the agreement.