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What’s New: Week of May 18

– Miracle Okoth Okumu Mudeyi, LL.B. (Hons) University of Nairobi, Master of Laws Candidate at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, Advocate of the High Court of Kenya

In this weekly feature, I-CONnect publishes a curated reading list of developments in public law. “Developments” may include a selection of links to news, high court decisions, new or recent scholarly books and articles, and blog posts from around the public law blogosphere.

To submit relevant developments for our weekly feature on “What’s New in Public Law,” please email iconnecteditors@gmail.com.

Developments in Constitutional Courts

  1. The Supreme Court of Kenya held that Parliament’s failure to enact legislation under Article 169(2) of the Constitution to regulate local tribunals amounted to unreasonable delay under Article 259(8), while declining to convert structural relief into judicial supervision of the legislative timetable. The Court treated constitutional inaction as justiciable where delay impairs access to justice, but preserved remedial restraint once Parliament is already constitutionally seized of the cure.
  2. The Constitutional Court of South Africa in Economic Freedom Fighters and Another v Speaker of the National Assembly and Others declared rule 129I of the National Assembly Rules unconstitutional and set aside the 13 December 2022 vote declining to refer the Phala Phala panel report to an impeachment committee. The majority held that a positive prima facie finding could not be defeated by political gatekeeping at the threshold stage. The decision refines the law of legislative accountability by distinguishing the Assembly’s ultimate removal power from its prior duty to maintain an effective Section 89 mechanism.
  3. The Supreme Court of Canada in Alford v Canada (Attorney General) upheld statutory limits on parliamentary privilege for members of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. The ruling is doctrinally important because it refuses to treat privilege as an untouchable common-law residue, locating its modern content within Parliament’s constitutional power to define, discipline, and limit institutional immunities where secrecy and oversight are made dependent on statutory design.
  4. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Yasak v Türkiye revisited the legality of terrorism convictions following the attempted coup in Türkiye, insisting that Article 7 requires an individualised establishment of the constituent elements of criminal liability even in emergency and counter-terrorism settings. The judgment matters because it resists the collapse of legality into national-security deference, carrying forward the doctrinal discipline of Yüksel Yalçınkaya while clarifying how criminal foreseeability operates after constitutional rupture.

In the News

  1. The Kenyan Senate opened public participation on the Referendum Bill, 2026, framed as a legislative response to referendum gaps exposed by the BBI litigation. The proposal matters beyond electoral administration because referendum law is now treated as part of Kenya’s constitutional amendment architecture, where procedure, public participation, and institutional sequence determine whether constituent power can be lawfully channelled.
  2. The South African Parliament moved to establish an impeachment committee after the Constitutional Court’s Phala Phala judgment, while President Cyril Ramaphosa stated that he would not resign and would challenge the underlying panel report. The development matters because the Court’s order has transformed impeachment from a defeated political motion into a constitutionally compelled accountability process, testing whether coalition politics can comply with judicially articulated duties without emptying them of effect.
  3. The Federal Parliament of Somalia approved constitutional changes that could extend presidential tenure and delay elections, amid continued contestation over the country’s electoral framework, demonstrating that formal amendment can become a vehicle for managing, rather than resolving, transition. The constitutional issue is not merely term length but whether emergency-laden state-building can be kept within rules capable of constraining incumbency.
  4. Peru’s National Elections Board confirmed a June 2026 presidential runoff between Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez after delayed first-round results and fraud allegations were dismissed, indicating that electoral legality is being asked to do institutional repair in a system marked by repeated presidential instability, fragmented representation, and low trust in electoral administration.

New Scholarship

  1. Maria Kotsoni, ‘Informal constitutional change and the rise of fiscal discipline in Europe: Ripple effects on fundamental social rights’ International Journal of Constitutional Law (2026) (examining how fiscal governance has altered constitutional practice without formal amendment, treating austerity and fiscal discipline as constitutional forces that reshape social rights by institutional habit, not only by adjudicated limitation)
  2. Eleni Frantziou, ‘Internet rights and the European Court of Human Rights: a systematic analysis of the role of the internet in the case law of the Strasbourg Court‘ 26(2) Human Rights Law Review (2026) (providing a systematic account of ECtHR internet jurisprudence across privacy, expression, equality, association, and education, and exposing the doctrinal incompleteness of treating the internet as merely a medium for existing rights, rather than a constitutional space that reorganises harm, access, and private power).
  3. Aikaterini Christina Koula, ‘Strengthening the rule of law: the necessity of protecting human rights defenders from criminalisation‘ 26(2) Human Rights Law Review (2026) (reframing human rights defenders as institutional actors within the rule of law rather than as external civil-society claimants, and showing that criminalisation of defenders weakens legality, accountability, and equality simultaneously, making civic space a public-law condition rather than a rights-adjacent concern).
  4. Sandra Liebenberg and Aoife Nolan, ‘Recognizing future generations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: An overdue reappraisal‘ 26(2) Human Rights Law Review (2026) (arguing for an evolutionary interpretation of the ICESCR capable of recognising obligations to future generations, destabilising presentist accounts of progressive realisation and maximum available resources and requiring socio-economic rights doctrine to account for intergenerational constitutional harm).
  5. Özgür Salmanoğ, ‘Exception, sovereignty and constitutional order: A Schmittian reading of Turkey’s constitutional trajectory‘ Global Constitutionalism (2026) (reading Turkey’s constitutional development through successive states of exception and sovereign refoundation, and resisting a purely backsliding account of authoritarian transformation, to instead treat emergency power as a recurring method through which constitutional identity and institutional authority are remade).

Call for Papers and Announcements

  1. The Universidad Externado de Colombia and the International Association of Constitutional will hold the IACL World Congress of Constitutional Law 2026 on the theme Sustainable Constitutionalism, from 6-10 July at Universidad Externado de Colombia.
  2. The ICON•S 2026 Annual Conference will take place at University College Dublin from 29 June to 1 July 2026 under the theme Reimagining Public Law for a Fractured World: Technology, Identity & Truth.
  3. The African Network of Constitutional Lawyers and the University of the Free State invite papers for the 2026 Winter School, Globality, Extraction and Sustainable Constitutionalism: African Resource Governance in a Multipolar World, to be held on 17 to 20 August 2026 at theUniversity of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 24 May 2026.
  4. Global Constitutionalism invites proposals for special issues, to be submitted by 23 September 2026.
  5. The European Yearbook of Constitutional Law invites submissions for its ninth volume (2027), which will focus on the theme “Reimagining Constitutional Identity in Europe”. The deadline for submissions is 1 June 2026.
  6. Comparative Constitutional Studies is now accepting submissions for volume 5.1. (2027). The deadline is 1 September 2026.

Elsewhere Online

  1. Victoria Miyandazi and Munene Njoroge, ‘When Parliament Drags its Feet, Can the Courts Step In? What are the Limits if Any?‘ I•CONnect (22 April 2026)
  2. Yuvraj S. Tuli, ‘Statutory Ambiguity and Democratic Accountability in U.S. and U.K. Public Law‘ I•CONnect (24 April 2026)
  3. Leonid Sirota, ‘Spinning the Wheel‘ Double Aspect (4 May 2026)
  4. Harry Camp, ‘The Weekly Round Up: Sussex ‘Closed Mind’ Quashed, Skinner Article 10 Acquittal, and the Palestine Action Appeal Heard‘ UK Human Rights Blog (5 May 2026)
  5. Pál Sonnevend, ‘Constitutional Repair!: Mapping the Context, Needs and Limits of Rebuilding Constitutional Democracy in Hungary‘ Verfblog (9 May 2026)
  6. Rajesh Ranjan, ‘Interview with Mark Tushnet | Can Constitutions Keep Majoritarians in Check?‘ The Wire (11 May 2026)

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