21 October 2024
Fractured Foundations and Pakistan’s Kafkaesque Constitutional Amendment
Pakistan is in the throes of yet another constitutional crisis. The ruling coalition government, which is heavily criticized for coming to power through blatantly rigged elections in February 2024, launched a campaign to amend the 1973 Constitution in significant ways. After weeks of speculation, the federal cabinet approved a draft on Sunday afternoon, which was approved by the Senate later the same evening. The National Assembly approved the draft today around 5 a.m., with the President assenting shortly thereafter. Continue reading >>
0 
06 September 2024
Why Institutional Reputation Matters
Mexico is about to adopt a constitutional amendment to reform the judicial branch. While framed as an attempt to restore the legitimacy and independence of the judiciary, it is, in reality, aimed at capturing the judiciary. In this blogpost, I discuss a key strategy that enabled this judicial overhaul: the President’s persistent and systematic defamatory attacks on the judiciary. I argue that to facing the threat of institutional defamation, we must recognize the importance of the right to reputation. Continue reading >>01 August 2024
Liberty of the Press Forever?
Constitutions are linked both to the past and to the future. A central constitutional mechanism in the attempt to mark a dividing line between the past and the future, to represent a new era are unamendable provisions. Unamendable provisions, in this sense, play a “negative” role, serving as a lasting reminder of recent past devastations and as a constitutional/institutional attempt to transform and never return to past injustices. It is within this framework of ‘never again constitutionalism’ I wish to examine one of the most unique and interesting unamendable provisions in the world: the protection of ‘Liberty of the press’ in the Mexican Constitution of 1824. Continue reading >>
0
16 November 2023
Is France Desacralizing its Constitution?
From 2002 to the present day, hundreds of constitutional bills have been proposed by delegates in Parliament, with forty of them being introduced within a year following the renewal of the Assemblée Nationale after the 2022 legislative elections. Each bill contains unique and far-reaching provisions. The proposals illustrate a shift within secondary constituent power, which no longer perceives the Constitution as a sacred text, the supreme standard of the French legal order, but as a wish list, and as an object of political communication subject to trivial media considerations. Continue reading >>
0
18 October 2023
Using the Constitution for Partisan Benefits
Last month, the Indian parliament passed the 106th amendment to the Constitution. It inserted several provisions to the Indian Constitution, collectively providing for horizontal reservation of one-third of directly elected seats of the House of the People, the state legislative assemblies, and the Delhi legislative assembly for women. In this blog, I discuss the political motivations underlying the enactment of this amendment and argue that this amendment is an opportunistic attempt by the incumbent government to reap partisan benefits using the Constitution before the upcoming state and general elections. Such actions demystify the idea that constitutions are a place for high-order politics. The amendment shows that with enough numbers, constitutions could easily be reduced into a political tool for furthering dominant political interests. Continue reading >>13 December 2022
Good Job, Move On
In early December, six political parties from the Turkish opposition have announced a joint and comprehensive constitutional reform proposal. If enacted, the proposal would amend a total of 84 articles of the Turkish Constitution, almost half of the nation’s governing charter. While this proposal deserves praise as a unique example of consensus building in Turkish political and constitutional history, the opposition should now focus on winning the upcoming elections instead of getting bogged down in the details of the proposal. Continue reading >>
0
03 December 2022
A Constitution’s Hollow Promise
On 26 November 2022, the Taiwanese people had their authentic constitutional voice heard for the first time in history by casting votes in a referendum on a constitutional amendment that would lower the age of voting from 20 to 18, and that of candidacy from 23 to 18 except as otherwise provided by the Constitution or legislation. Given that Taiwan’s current Constitution was adopted by a Constituent National Assembly in China in 1946 when Japan still held sovereignty over Taiwan de jure and all the previous constitutional amendments were adopted without receiving direct approval from the Taiwanese people, the holding of referendum itself is historic. Yet, this latest round of constitutional reform on Taiwan’s road towards an ever more democratic politics ends up as a damp squib. Continue reading >>
0
21 October 2022
Christian Schmidt’s Stabilitocracy
The High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina Christian Schmidt has imposed amendments to the Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Election Law of Bosnia and Herzegovina. By this decision, Schmidt questioned the role of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina – should Bosnia and Herzegovina be a democratic state or a state of ‘ethnic stabilitocracy’? Schmidt showed us that ‘ethnic stabilitocracy’ is the current aim of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Continue reading >>13 August 2022
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
In Brazil, the National Congress recently passed the Constitutional Amendment no. 123, nicknamed the “Kamikaze Bill” due to it budgetary impact. It qualifies the current situation – inflation, rise of gasoline price, shortage of goods, pandemic to name just a few – as an emergency state, creating financial and tax benefits for biofuel producers and providing welfare payments for part of the population. Continue reading >>
0
10 July 2022