Month: September 2012
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Venezuelan Elections/FP
I recently did an analysis on the upcoming Venezuelan elections for Foreign Policy. Although some interesting observations on the possible effects of constitutionally mandated voter participation laws failed to make it past the cutting room floor, I suspect it may still be of interest to the readers of this blog.
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Pussy Riot: when “disproportionate” is inappropriate
Shortly after a Moscow court sentenced the three female rock musicians from Pussy Riot to two years in a penal colony for ‘hooliganism,’ the United States Embassy in Russia sent off the following disapproving tweet: “Today’s verdict in the Pussy Riot case looks disproportionate.”
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Uganda at 50 and the problem of “sham constitutions”
Today’s Sunday Monitor features a stinging but unsurprising assessment of the state of Uganda’s 1995 constitution by Busingye Kabumba, who teaches constitutional law at Makerere University in Kampala. The title says it all: “The 1995 Uganda Constitution is nothing but an illusory law.”
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The German Constitutional Court and Europe
[By Russell Miller, Professor of Law at Washington & Lee University, co-author of the forthcoming The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (3d ed. 2012)] On 12 September 2012 the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) is set to announce its ruling on requests for temporary injunctions that would keep President Gauck from giving his assent to Parliament’s ratification of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) Treaty.