After a steady process of influence upon states, both the Court and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights are subject today to significant and direct challenges from states. From the use of diplomatic mechanisms to contain the powers of human rights bodies, to the challenges by domestic courts of the doctrines of the Inter-American Court,...
Parliamentary Supremacy in the Commonwealth: Dominions and the struggle for legislative autonomy
The story of legislative autonomy in the Dominions typically ends with the incorporate of the Statute of Westminster. This overlooks the subsequent struggles within the Dominions to establish some form of parliamentary supremacy as an internal norm within their constitutional structures. This was particularly noticeable in those Dominions which possessed a unitary form of government,...
Parliamentary access to information in two different yet similar domains: Economic and security governance compared
At first sight, parliamentary participation in Economic and Security governance within the European Union (EU) do not appear to have much in common. In particular, in the economic and monetary area many competences have been transferred to the EU level or, at least, the EU coordinates Member States policy, By contrast, the security area is...
Non Conviction Based Confiscation Against Corruption and Human Rights: the European Public Law Perspective
According to the Italian Law 161/2017 (amending Legislative Decree 159/2011, s.c. Anti-Mafia Code), non-conviction based confiscation measures, i.e., measures that allow for confiscation in the absence of a prior criminal conviction of an individual, can now be applied also to recover assets of people charged with conspiracy to commit various crimes against the public administration...
Neuroscience and law within the recent Italian law on living will: which role for experts?
Where neurosciences, developing unremittingly over time, interweave with law and, in particular, with end-of-life decisions matter, severe and sensitive implications become evident. Lawyers and lawmakers cannot remain unaffected by these implications. Accordingly, a complex entanglement between science/technique, law and politics must take place. Was this alliance considered in the case of the recent Italian law...
Protecting social rights in an interconstitutional context: a southern European view
The economic crisis of the last decade has had well-known detrimental effects on fundamental rights in the EU, in particular on social rights and especially in the south of Europe. The issue of social rights protection during the crisis was a clear case of multi-level constitutionalism (or inter constitutionality, the preferred term in Portuguese). The...
Protecting women from violence: a European comparative analysis from domestic norms to the Istanbul Convention
In the European context, constitutional and legislative provisions as well as international conventions prohibits violence against women. Notably, in 2014 the Council of Europe (CoE) so-called Istanbul Convention entered into force, providing for a wide range of measures against specific crimes (such as female genital mutilation, forced marriage, stalking, forced abortion, and forced sterilization) and...
PRIOR RESTRAINT IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Since the 1930s one of the fundamental First Amendment doctrines has been the rule against prior restraint of speech: there are strict limitations on the constitutionality of preventing expressions, even harmful ones, before they occur. One of the implications of the doctrine is the courts‘ refusal to issue injunctions against speech. The rationale of the...
Populism and legal fundamentalism
In this paper, I argue that the contemporary conservative, populist engagement with the law in a number of East-Central European societies is – at least in part – a reaction to what is portrayed as legal fundamentalism or an excessive juridification of society. Populism is to an important extent driven by the opposite idea, that...
Regulatory approaches to Free expression in Europe
The analysis aims to provide the initial answers to the question how the Internet has influenced the exercise and the judicial protection of this freedom. The rapid evolution of Internet stands behind the current ‘regulatory nervousness‘ around the free expression. The shift from national anxieties to the continental regulatory zeal is caused by the lack...