Category: Analysis
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Reforming Canada’s Senate
–Michael Pal, University of Toronto While the Canadian constitutional model has proven to be an influential one,[1] the unelected federal Senate is the dirty little secret at its heart. Last week by way of the reference procedure[2] the federal government sought the Supreme Court’s guidance on the constitutionality of various options for Senate reform.
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Drafting Independence: The Catalan Declaration of Sovereignty and the Question of the Constituent Power of the People in Context
–Zoran Oklopcic, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University On January 23, 2013 the Catalan Parliament adopted the Declaration of Sovereignty and Right to Decide of the Catalan People.[1] The Declaration proclaims ‘the people of Catalonia’ to be ‘a sovereign political and legal subject’ with a ‘right to decide … their collective political future’.
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Constitutional Text and Political Reality in China
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School The New York Times recently published an interesting article on the Chinese Constitution. As the article reports, Chinese reformers are lobbying the government to live up to the commitments entrenched in the Constitution. These reformers see a disjuncture between the constitutional text and political reality in China, and they want…
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Hong Kong’s Two Constitutional “Outsiders”
–Dr. P. Y. Lo, Visiting Fellow, Centre of Comparative and Public Law, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong. Rosalind Dixon and Vicki Jackson’s upcoming article (available here and reviewed on this blog on 4 November 2012 here) on the phenomenon of “extraterritorial” actors interpreting a country’s constitution in the course of conducting international affairs…
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The Greek Austerity Measures: Remedies Under International Law
— George Katrougalos, Professor of Public Law, Demokritus University, Greece (gkatr@otenet.gr) In a prior post, I argued that the Greek austerity measures violated various provisions of the Greek Constitution, as well as treaty commitments and other instruments embodied in international law.
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The Greek Austerity Measures: Violations of Socio-Economic Rights
—George Katrougalos, Professor of Public Law, Demokritus University, Greece (gkatr@otenet.gr) Recently, the European Committee of Social Rights (the supervisory body of the European Social Charter) delivered two decisions on collective complaints, condemning Greece for violation of articles 10 and 12 of the Charter because of its austerity legislation enacted in 2010.
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Of Pirates and Caymans: Lessons from the Privy Council for Interpretation of Hong Kong’s Basic Law
–Alvin Y. H. Cheung, Barrister-at-Law, Sir Oswald Cheung’s Chambers, Hong Kong At the ceremonial opening of the legal year of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (“HKSAR”) on 14 January 2013, Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma, Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen SC and Kumar Ramanathan SC, Chairman of the Bar Association, spoke at length about protecting…
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The First Haitian Constitution
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School As we follow Haiti’s slow march toward democracy in the news, media reports often highlight that Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere and the world’s first independent black republic. Yet what is often if not always missing is this: Haiti adopted one of the first written…
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The UK 3 – British Christians 1
Lorenzo Zucca King’s College London British Christians are becoming increasingly more vocal about the presence of their faith in the workplace. Four of them brought cases all the way to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg (based on Article 9 and Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights) to claim…
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Toward a New European Abortion Constitutionalism?
—Ruth Rubio Marin, European University Institute Modern constitutionalism, born at the end of the 18th century with the French and American Revolutions, is a historically grounded venture. At the time, women did not enjoy civil equality, their freedom being largely dependent on their marital status, nor political citizenship–female enfranchisement not becoming a widespread reality until…