Category: Ran Hirschl
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“Targeted killings” yet again?
An interesting story from Israel. Compliance with judicial scrutiny of “process-light” measures adopted by governments to combat terrorism is certainly not limited to the post-9/11 context. Spain (ETA), Britain (Northern Ireland), or Peru (Shining Path) are merely few examples. In 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court banned the use of torture in interrogations by Israel’s General…
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The ECtHR rules on Greek-Cypriots’ Right of Return; the ECJ rules on the Economic Treaty Status of Jewish Settlements
Two important rulings from Europe reinforce the increasing significance of supra-national quasi-constitutional regimes in dealing with international political hot potatoes. In a landmark ruling the ECtHR held last week (Demopoulos et al. v. Turkey)that Greek refugees who had fled northern Cyprus during the Turkish invasion in 1974 do not have an automatic, unqualified right of…
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Czech court outlaws extreme right party
As reported in several media outlets (e.g. here), the Czech Republic’s Supreme Administrative Court has banned the far-right Workers’ Party, established in 2003. The court held that the party advocates a dangerous xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi agenda and thus poses an intolerable threat to Czech democracy.
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Constitutional courts in hot political water in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and in the Republic of Macedonia
Several of the now independent countries, once republics of the former Yugoslavia are a constant source of politically signficant constitutional jurisprudence. The last week provided two illustrations. As our avid readers will recall, the European Court of Human Rights held last December that the “consociational” or “power-sharing” pact in Bosnia-Herzegovina (one of the outcomes of…
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Shoe Throwing at the Israeli Supreme Court
A strange incident at the Israeli Supreme Court — a person with a record of threatening lower court judges threw his shoes (a-la Iraqi journalist move) at no else than Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch during a Supreme Court hearing in a matter unrelated to the shoe thrower.
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UKSC rules on Jewish school admission criteria
As the New York Times and other media outlets report, on Wednesday, Dec. 16 the newly established UKSC released its landmark ruling in a case involving apparently discriminatory admission criteria by a Jewish school in North London. According to the traditional Orthodox Judaism definition, a person may be recognized as Jewish only if his or…
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Turkey’s Constitutional Court bans pro-Kurdish party
Under the 1982 Turkish Constitution, Turkey’s Constitutional Court – a stronghold of Kemalist-statist interests and an active defender of Turkey’s militant secularism – is vested with the power to order the closure of political parties whose agenda is found to be “in conflict with the indivisible integrity of the State with its territory and nation,…
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A Win for Wal-Mart, in Canada of All Places
Last week I wrote here about a landmark anti-privatization ruling by the Supreme Court of Israel. But those who thought the days of pro-business, neo-liberal jurisprudence were over, got a sobering reality check reminder last Friday, courtesy of the Supreme Court of Canada.
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Israeli Supreme Court says Privatized Prisons Unconstitutional
Until the early-1980s, Israel’s economy was one of the most centralized in the non-communist world. Over the last two decades, it has undergone considerable liberalization that at times amounted to a local version of an all-out Thatcherite neo-liberalism. During much of the 1990s, the Supreme Court was quite cooperative, granting property rights an elevated constitutional…
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Canadian Language Wars (yet again)
Canada is arguably one of the world capitals when it comes to language rights jurisprudence. The fundamental disagreements concerning the preferential status of French in Quebec vis-à-vis Canada’s commitment to bilingualism have been a perennial bone of constitutional contention over the last 30 years.