Federalism is often seen as a viable tool to reconcile unity and diversity, and in a continent deeply torn by ethnic cleavages such as Africa, federalism has often been taken into account to tame internal tensions, although not always successfully. Since the mid-1990s, several African countries have turned to federalism to restructure their constitutional system....
Tag: <span>TUESDAY JUNE 26 2018 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM</span>
CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICS IN ASIA
The panel explores contemporary instances in which constitutional law interacts with politics in leading jurisdictions in Southeast Asia. It adopts a dual take as to the meaning of politics. On the one hand, it showcases how courts and other institutions grapple with potentially explosive ‘high politics’ questions that go towards a polity’s self-understanding and the...
INTERNATIONAL NORMS AND CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN UNRECEPTIVE ENVIRONMENTS: THE SOUTH EAST ASIAN CONUNDRUM II (CONSTITUTIONALISM AS REGIONAL IMAGINARY)
In South East Asia there is sensitivity to international law intruding on domestic sovereignty; a patchy tradition of constitutional democracy; and the central vehicle for international engagement, ASEAN, largely eschews binding norms. A sister panel explored how ASEAN had reconfigured systems of administration around a model of the investee State. This panel explores the way...
TRANSPARENCY AND PARTICIPATION IN CHINA‘S LOCAL GOVERNANCE
Reinforcing local governance has been a new focus of Chinese political reform. While the intellectual and institutional legacies of administrative law reform proposed by the central government have set tones of the overall reforms, local experimentalism constituted the main practice in the past years and is also being transformed into a new order of China‘s...
INVESTMENT COURTS: CHALLENGES, PERSPECTIVES AND REGIONAL POLICIES
Suggestions for the creation of permanent investment courts have been formulated for decades, but only recently they started taking actual institutional form. In particular, the European Commission has been pushing for a court-like mechanism for investment disputes in several recent trade negotiations. Such a framework was included in the EU treaties with Vietnam and Canada,...
IS EXPRESSION THE NEW PRIVACY? LESSONS FROM THE REGULATION OF PERSONAL DATA FOR THE GOVERNANCE OF SPEECH
With the proliferation of information and communication technologies come needs for new or adjusted regulation in the various legal fields. The predominant area affected by new regulation has been the right to privacy and personal data protection. Recently, another area of law has gained increasing importance in light of new regulatory attempts: the freedom of...
CHINA‘S “ONE COUNTRY, TWO SYSTEMS“: REFLECTIONS FROM HONG KONG AND MACAU
Hong Kong and Macau are the only two “special administrative regions“ in China- regions that are given a high degree of autonomy and allowed to not practice China‘s Socialist systems. This panel evaluates the nearly 21 years (for Hong Kong) and 18 years (for Macau) of implementing this “One Country, Two Systems“ governing mode and...
CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS? II
The early twenty-first century appears of be a period of turmoil in many seemingly stable constitutional democracies. This panel and two others discuss such questions as these: Are there general forces weakening constitutional democracy around the world, or are there nation-specific reasons for crises that simply happen to be occurring at roughly the same time?...
“Constitution-Making and Authoritarianism in Venezuela: The First Time as Tragedy, the Second as Farce
Marx‘s famous phrase holds that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.“ The phrase seems apt for the two Constituent Assemblies in Venezuela over the past twenty years: Hugo Chavez‘s in 1999 and Nicolas Maduro‘s in 2017. While constitution-making moments are sometimes romanticized as the high point of democratic constitutionalism,...