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In recent times, the idea of popular sovereignty has figured prominently in the rhetoric of neo-populist thinkers and activists who argue that legal and political authority must be concentrated in one single body or individual elected by the people to act in its name. The thesis of this article is that, while the notion of popular sovereignty may seem to offer some support to the neo-populist image of democracy, it serves more persuasively to support the idea of a polycentric, constitutional democracy. The constitutional state can be polycentric and yet feature a sovereign. And if this constitutional state is democratic in the sense of distributing power relatively equally amongst individual citizens, thus empowering the people-several, then it will establish the people-corporate in the role of sovereign.

This review essay examines the recently published collection titled Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?. The insightful and diverse range of chapters in this book mainly seek to answer a combination of questions in relation to liberal democratic constitutionalism.

Transitional Justice (TJ) focuses on the processes of dealing with the legacy of large-scale past abuses (in the aftermath of traumatic experiences such as war or authoritarianism) with the aim of fostering domestic justice and creating the basis for a sustainable peace. TJ however also entails the problem of how a torn society may be able to become a self-determining member of a just international order. This paper presents a minimal conception of TJ, which departs from Rawls' conception of normative stability of the international order, which suggests disentangling the two goals of fostering democracy within torn societies and TJ itself. The scope of TJ is therefore limited to enabling these societies to create minimal internal conditions for joining a just international order on equal footing. This paper makes an original contribution to two different debates, namely normative research on TJ, and post-Rawlsian literature in general. First, it provides a new direction for normative theorizing about TJ which takes both its domestic and international dimensions seriously into consideration. Second, it extends Rawls' political liberal outlook to an area where it is not usually understood to apply.

The undisputed success of Sri Lanka’s first Election Commission (2015 – 2020) was the conduct of free and fair elections, that is to say, electoral management. I argue in this article that, by design and in practice, it was unable to or failed to advance electoral integrity that is urgently required for the health of Sri Lanka’s constitutional democracy. At critical points when electoral integrity and constitutional democracy were threatened, it is the Court, the traditional institutional check on the Executive and the Legislature, that prevented its further erosion. In this regard, the Commission made a modest contribution, but that contribution was contingent on personal disposition of the Commissioners. The Commission, therefore, was an institutional innovation that addressed symptoms of Sri Lanka’s ailing constitutional democracy but not its root-causes. The Commission has been a necessary but insufficient fix for the electoral pathologies of Sri Lanka’s constitutional democracy. Its ‘guarantor’ function, as I illustrate in this article, is narrowly conceived, perceived and lived out.

In this paper I draw on qualitative material from the first complete data set of the ‘Measure of the quality of life in detention’ (MQLD) survey in the UK to explore common causes of distress in immigration removal centres and to reflect on their implication for understanding and challenging these sites. While similarities between immigration detention centres and prisons make it tempting to place the testimonies from people in detention within the framework of the ‘pains of imprisonment’, I propose an alternative reading of these first-hand accounts. Rather than approaching them as sociological statements of suffering, caused by the loss of liberty, I interpret them as political statements which, in turn, demand a political response. Immigration Removal centres, these people assert, are fundamentally at odds with key values of a liberal democracy. Those detained within them are not considered to be equal members of a shared community of value; rather, their incarceration in detention centres marks them out symbolically but also, as the testimonies in this piece make clear, quite practically, as outsiders to these ideas. The pain people describe illuminates the need for a new politics of detention.

Constitutional theory dating to Montesquieu identified three branches of government, each with a specific function: the legislature enacted general rules, the executive enforced the rules, and the judiciary resolved disputes about the rules’ meaning and application. Every government had to have these branches in some form; that is, the branches were necessary elements in a governance structure. In addition, the branches were exhaustive: that is, taken together they did everything a government could do.

This article examines how understandings of the rule of law are shaped in the Chechen diaspora in Norway. Taking as our point of departure studies of legal pluralism and the co-existence of traditional Adat, religious Sharia and Russian secular law in Chechnya, we examine the effect of living in a host country by asking: How do members of the Chechen diaspora, here defined as conflict-generated diaspora, view and internalize legal models in Norway? What type of state governance do they see as ideal for themselves and for Chechnya in the future? Further: what might the underlying explanation for their choices be? We assume that just as different waves of violence in Chechnya created different diaspora communities that today exhibit specific social, cultural and political traits, the latest wave of forced emigration to Europe after the post-Soviet Russo–Chechen wars may have made specific imprints on the legal preferences of this diaspora. The picture that emerges from our in-depth individual interviews and surveys is one of gradual adaptation and adjustment to Norwegian state governance and rule of law, demonstrating the complex and co-constitutive relationships between changing identities and legal preferences.

Postwar recovery efforts foreground gender equality as a key component of building more liberal democracies. This review explores the burgeoning scholarship on women's rights after war, first grappling with war as a period of possibility for building new gender-inclusive institutions. We review efforts in three arenas: increasing women's political representation in postwar democratic transitions; improving access to justice for women through the extension of property rights and bodily autonomy within systems of carceral justice; and integrating women into labor markets and security sectors through various components of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Yet these inclusionary efforts have too often sought to dismantle one form of oppression (gender inequality) without challenging others. We document how projects to center women in liberal democratic reforms following war inadvertently overlook other manifestations of violence at the core of these institutions.

During the rule of law backsliding crisis in Poland since late 2015, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) have been active in the struggles to defend judicial independence. CSOs cooperate closely with judges and support their ‘judicial resistance’. This Article has three main objectives: describe and analyze the relationship between judges and CSOs; show the evolution — both continuity and discontinuity in their relations over time; assess whether CSOs’ activities are of any practical significance and therefore worth attention. The CSO-judicial relationship is analyzed for three periods: 1976–1989, the years before the transformation of Poland from a ‘people’s republic’ to a democracy; 1989–2015, the time of building liberal democracy and the rule of law; 2015–2020, the time of defending the rule of law from a populist attack.Drawing on sources including years of participant observation providing unique and insider knowledge, the author analyzes the activities and outputs of CSOs and judges focusing on their interactions and cooperation. The author argues that CSOs play a significant role in the struggle for the rule of law and judicial independence. This Article demonstrates that CSOs’ current engagement and input is not an extraordinary, ad hoc phenomenon, but rather one that arose from the previous interactions between the judiciary and civil society. The author argues that what we witness in Poland is an unprecedented phenomenon, both in the character of the relationship between judges and CSOs, and the scale and diversity of their cooperation. At the same time, the author claims that CSOs are underappreciated, including by academia, their work is taken for granted, and their role in the legal complex can be seen as a partly lost opportunity. If noticed, appreciated, and supported CSOs activities and their role could be more meaningful.

Este artigo resgata alguns conceitos doutrinários sobre o tempo até sua compreensão como uma instituição social, com referencial teórico no filósofo belga François Ost. Com base nessa concepção, o trabalho identifica quatro momentos característicos no período transcorrido entre o golpe civil-militar e a democracia constitucional no Brasil. Conclui-se que o processo transicional brasileiro se revela como atrasado e inacabado, e que no momento em que a Constituição brasileira completa trinta anos é urgente retomar o processo constitucional de transição, sob pena de surgirem fissuras no Estado Democrático de Direito brasileiro. Enviado el (Submission Date): 18/10/2020 Aceptado el (Acceptance Date): 22/12/2020

In his 1953 novel of ideas, The Outsider, Richard Wright ominously predicted that industrial capitalist society would inexorably result in “the total and absolute in modern life.” Wright did not mean that Soviet communism would prevail, capturing the hearts and minds of Americans. His point was that the West's capitalist democracy was just as capable of slouching toward a dystopian, totalitarian future as the Soviet Union. How might Wright’s prescient thoughts on the death of liberal democracy inform our attempts to save ourselves from the “totalitarian danger” looming in the United States? As multiracial American democracy, voting rights, and the rule of law are under assault from the U.S. far right, it is abundantly clear that anti‐Black racism animates the enemies of democracy and those who would establish and support autocratic rule. These reflections seek to historicize the assault on democracy in the US and the epochal events of 2020, including: the global protests following the murder of George Floyd by police;the death of hundreds of thousands in the US during the global Coronavirus pandemic;and concerted efforts by Trump and the far‐right to destroy multiracial democracy before and after the 2020 election, culminating in the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Peace & Change is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Constitutional review has become a hallmark of modern liberal democracy. The efficacy of this review, however, is far from guaranteed. In this article, I argue that courts enhance judicial authorit...

The article studies the compliance of democracy of the Baltic States with the principle of tolerance. The study demonstrated specific social phobias (xenophobia, migrant phobia, homophobia, islamophobia, romaphobia, etc.), hate speech and other destructive trends in the Baltic countries that contradict values of liberal democracy. The authors argue that Baltic States face similar challenges of strengthening the principle of tolerance as well as how they differ in intolerance manifestations and mechanisms of their prevention and counteraction. In the Baltic States, issues related to promotion of tolerance are claimed to be common at two levels: at the institutional level (countries do not fulfil some of the EU guidelines aimed at enhancing the principle of tolerance); at the value level (population does not accept completely liberal-democratic values that the EU advocates).

In this article, I revisit the question of socio-economic transformation in South Africa to illustrate how it connects with human rights, essentially because, as I argue, transformation is unattainable without a comprehensive understanding of the central role of human rights in activating that process. I state the claim that the progressive human rights culture on the basis of which South Africa launched itself from the demise of apartheid into one of the most treasured constitutional democracies globally is noticeably disintegrating, displaying signs of post-independence failures that have bedevilled many other African countries. It leaves unanswered questions with regard to the transitional promise for a better life and equitable opportunities. Not only is the political intent to actualise the project for socio-economic transformation apparently lacking, prospects that the expectations of the impoverished segments of the population may never be fulfilled prompts the need for an in-depth diagnosis of the contrasts that dissociate the country from its constitutional commitment to remedy the injustices of the past, which remain visible in legislation, policies, institutional practices, governance mechanisms and social perceptions that seem to be hardwired to accommodate transformation. I aim to demonstrate that even though South Africa’s constitutional democracy is anchored on a radical undertaking to eradicate the injustices that unreasonably limit options for the larger part of the population, there is no genuine adherence to the constitutional standards for transformation under the present dispensation, which is shaped by misconceived and misdirected priorities at the expense of human rights that lie at the core of the project for socio-economic transformation. I articulate these viewpoints by bringing into sharper focus the connection between human rights and transformation so that perhaps, the arguments may provide conceptual direction in academic discourses and probably also shape policy direction in crafting transformative solutions to the socio-economic exigencies that South Africa is confronted with.

This paper challenges Peter Benson’s claim that his theory of justice in transactions can provide a public basis of justification in the Rawlsian sense specifically worked out for contract law. It argues that Benson’s distinct conception of the contracting parties and their relationships makes it an unlikely candidate for public justification in contemporary liberal democracies that are characterized by the fact of a reasonable pluralism of worldviews. Moreover, Benson’s method of deriving principles of contractual justice from existing contract law doctrines and principles risks pre-empting any critical potential for normative contract theory. In addition, its quasi universalism seems difficult to match with the political autonomy of citizens in democratic societies. Finally, Benson’s understanding of contract law as separate from politics appears at odds, not merely with Rawlsian political justice, but with the very idea of public justification.

In this paper we establish a working definition of, and develop a legal rationale for, the insertion of a constitutional Right to Health (RTH) protection in the Constitution of Ireland. We propose that a legal framework exists for the judicial enforcement of a right to health in Ireland, as based on parallels drawn between Irish case law and that of RSA, a comparable common law constitutional democracy with a developed jurisprudential approach to its constitutional RTH. When modelled after precedential international provisions, this right strengthens and defends health policy goals (such as universal health care) through a common-law system of governmental accountability. Additionally, national rights to health have observable correlations with improved public health, and it stimulates institutional initiatives. The 1937 Constitution of Ireland includes several personal, social, and economic rights, and a RTH would complement the existing right to primary education as a socio-economic right. We note these considerations were discussed during the legislative proposal made in the 32nd Dail for a constitutional RTH, which emerged in response to Ireland's ongoing efforts toward health policy reform.

Administrative law in its development has two dimensions, on the one hand guarantee the realization of state power balance and includes the relationship between the relevant state institutions and on the other hand guarantee the harmonization between the function and duties of the state with the ideals of the nation, it is also clear that the administrative law is a realized media From the concept of limitation of power as it becomes the core of a constitutional democracy, the method of approaching normative juridical, the results of the study stated that the issue of the implementation of the State Administrative Court's court ruling depend on the moral ethics of public officials, has made a state administrative court ruling difficult to exceed in reality in society. Such conditions have contrary to the principle of the Litit of the Oportet which requires every case there must be finally because the purpose of the case of the court to the court is certainly to get a solution. Pancasila justice is a basic principle must be implemented in the decision of the State Administrative Court to realize the certainty of law and justice needed by the community.

This reply to Gila Stopler’s provocative piece on the possible complicity of political liberalism and right-wing populism welcomes Stopler’s strategy of identifying structural weaknesses in liberal theory. But it also presents three specific disagreements: first, it is argued that Rawls is much less of a defender of the status quo in really existing liberal democracies than Stopler makes him out to be; second, the argument is advanced that political liberalism has significant resources to counter right-wing populism; and, third and most important, it is claimed, following the work of philosophers such as Gina Schouten, that political liberalism can (and must) incorporate feminist concerns.

We all agree that democratic decision-making requires a factual input, and most of us assume that when the pertinent facts are not in plain view they should be furnished by well-functioning scientific institutions. But how should liberal democracy respond when apparently sincere, rational and well-informed citizens object to coercive legislation because it is based on what they consider a misguided trust in certain parts of science? Cases are familiar, the most prominent concerning climate science and evolution, but one may also count GMO-skepticism and vaccine-skepticism, and there are plenty of others. The paper defends what I, borrowing an expression from Badiola, call Science as Public Reason, asserting roughly that some policy-relevant factual proposition P is part of public reason if and only if there is consensus about P among scientific experts in the relevant well-functioning scientific institutions. I defend this view against the controversiality objection claiming that scientific findings cannot in this general way pass as public reason as they are sometimes controversial among reasonable citizens. My preferred line of defense is what I call Dogmatism about Science as Public Reason, which roughly amounts to insisting on Science as Public Reason on the ground that it is a philosophically well-motivated view, while conceding that it may not be acceptable to all minimally rational and well-informed individuals.

I am the Law It is hard to imagine two more disparate characters than Judge Joseph Dredd and Hercules J—the one an over-muscular, faceless and heavily armed street judge astride a Lawmaster motorcycle who overidentifies with his role (‘I am the Law’); the other devoid of any physical presence or image, and structurally decoupled from the execution of law by a fierce determination to maintain the separation of powers and accountability which Dredd so effortlessly ignores. Hercules J is the embodiment of an intellectualised, yet creative, operationalisation of law. To the academic spirit, Hercules is infinitely preferable as a model of judicial activism: his world conjures a contemplative modality, ever alert to the requirements of rights and largely aligned with the temper of the post-Enlightenment. By contrast, Dredd is the personification of the worst aspects of law-and-order as the debased and politicised manifestation of the Rule of Law. His is an intensely visceral presence, the metonymic blindness of Themis replaced by the Dredd’s fractured eyeline: blindness as a signifier of impartiality yields to blindness as a symptom of institutional rage. This article interrogates the characters, actions and values of Hercules J and Dredd J, viewed primarily through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s Force of Law, focusing on the relationship between law and violence as it is exposed (or hidden) in Hercules’s and Dredd’s worlds, and then turning to judicial confrontation with the aporetic: the aporias, identified by Derrida and others, that law must confront. The interrogation continues, finally contemplating the current state of law in the common law world—the world of liberal democracies, suggesting that the high point of democracy may well have passed, and that we are on a Dredd-ward trajectory.

The article takes up the difficult problem of the so-called disobedience of judges against the background of the experiences of the Polish departure from constitutional democracy in 2015–2020. The special role and responsibility of a judge in the state imposes restrictions on her freedom of opinion in the public sphere. Openly manifesting opposition to government policy, which in the case of an ordinary citizen is only the implementation of human rights and freedoms, may be described as controversial and contrary to applicable ethical regulations. The main thesis of this paper is the assertion that although judges who act as impartial arbitrators in disputes should generally refrain from ostentatiously opposing the actions of political authorities, they are not deprived of the possibility of protest. Also in the exercise of office, and not outside the sphere of their duties, judges should take into account overriding moral values that should be implemented by the legal order, and not the values or declarations guiding the government policies. The integrity of the judge, which prescribes restraint in statements and actions in the public sphere, as well as the care for the dignity of the office held, should not be confused with absolute subordination to the legislature or the executive, even if the judge is obliged to apply the law. The traditional attitude of the members of the judiciary, consisting in focusing only on the application of the law in individual cases and the lack of any political involvement, is being reviewed in the face of the spread of majoritarianism and the law abuse as normal techniques of exercising public authority. The disobedience of judges—although difficult to defend at first sight—may seem to be the only possible way to draw public attention to the corruption of the state system. The ‘disobediant’ judges can even be assigned the role of ‘whistleblowers’, which should help to ease their legal liability or their future rehabilitation.

This paper deals with the challenges of rationing of existential goods due to scarcity and conflicting interests (at the latest in the question of costs). The legal-political example pursued in this paper is rationing in the health care system, i. e. in curative and partly also in preventive measures. In each case - and in everyday life and by no means only in extreme corona pandemic situations - it is a question of whether there are absolute, ponder-proof claims to certain goods. Ultimately, this is to be denied, even if rationing, especially in Germany, is usually concealed behind vague concepts such as the medical necessity and economic efficiency of treatment. But the public authorities cannot escape the weighing process - even if its consequences are often fatal in industrial society. In particular, misunderstandings of human dignity as well as skewed accusations of utilitarianism and a misleading pseudo-controversy between deontology and consequentialism have for a long time obscured the fact that in liberal democracies a balancing of different aspects of freedom and freedom preconditions is inevitable. Due to parliamentary reservations, however, this weighing must not be outsourced to administrative committees. Caution is called for in all of this with the economic cost-benefit analysis, which is hardly tenable in its foundations, with egalitarian approaches, and with the traditional but unfounded idea that fundamental rights are primarily (or exclusively) protected in single situations and are not relevant in the case of mass concern. Based on the latter point, it can also be shown that the previous tendency is not convincing to judge areas such as curative health treatment, preventive corona hazard control and fine dust or climate policy as being completely different from each other in terms of fundamental rights.

The Tax Administration Act 28 of 2011 is a law of general application. Section 45 of the Act empowers a SARS official to enter, without a warrant, premises where a trade or enterprise is reasonably believed to be carried on in order to conduct an inspection aimed at gathering information that will aide SARS in determining whether the business operator is compliant with tax obligations. In a constitutional democracy, the enjoyment of fundamental rights has a high premium. Accordingly, every lawful exercise of the power conferred by s 45 must take place in an orderly fashion, with decency and respect for taxpayers and their privacy. The state may not unduly interfere with this right, whether by withdrawing it altogether, abridging it, or diminishing its scope and ambit. This article hypothesises that inspections undertaken in terms of s 45 limit taxpayers’ privacy in a manner that may not pass muster under s 36(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. On this basis, it is argued that, to cure its deficiencies, s 45 ought to be amended by the introduction of the provisions proposed in this article.

The regress of liberal democracy in the world has been progressing for years and the number of countries with the full democracy index is decreasing [Economist Intelligence Unit 2018, 2019; Freedom House 2018]. One of the serious threats to the rule of law and the human rights in modern democracy has become discriminatory legalism which is both strategy and weapon [Weyland 2013]. In order to weaken or marginalize the opposition and “rebellious” citizens, public authorities apply discriminatory legal instruments and democratic rules depending on who they are concerned with. Public authorities do this because of political views and use exclusion rhetoric, a language of hatred, stigmatizing all “strangers”, at last use hate speech on the Internet and beyond. The weaponization of hate speech is a convenient instrument for political struggle and the fight against inconvenient opponents. Hate speech is also used by far-right and nationalist organizations in the public sphere, which operate in an atmosphere of consent to their radical behaviour. Political hate speech plays an important role in the discriminatory legal strategy. Poland is included in the group of countries with flawed democracy (Article 7(1) TEU since 2017). The authorities introduced changes in law (which were defied as the “Frankensteinisation of legislation” by the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe [PACE] in 2019), democratic institutions and the prosecution applies a discriminatory legalism strategy. This problem is highlighted by the current Commissioner for Human Rights which is an independent institution in the field of fighting hate speech (except a few independent media and NGOs informing about the hate speech phenomenon). Many of hate speech cases are discontinued or not taken up by the prosecution. The numbers of cases of hate speech and hate incidents are increasing but the Polish authorities use the underreporting mechanism. The Ombudsman warns that only 5% of cases are reported to the police. The language of hatred and contempt used by the authorities in Poland has become the weaponization in the fight against citizens as political opponents: LGBT+ community, refugees, political opponents, independent judges and others.

Scholars and policymakers long believed that norms of global information openness and private-sector governance helped to sustain and promote liberalism. These norms are being increasingly contested within liberal democracies. In this article, we argue that a key source of debate over the Liberal International Information Order (LIIO), a sub-order of the Liberal International Order (LIO), is generated internally by “self-undermining feedback effects,” that is, mechanisms through which institutional arrangements undermine their own political conditions of survival over time. Empirically, we demonstrate how global governance of the Internet, transnational disinformation campaigns, and domestic information governance interact to sow the seeds of this contention. In particular, illiberal states converted norms of openness into a vector of attack, unsettling political bargains in liberal states concerning the LIIO. More generally, we set out a broader research agenda to show how the international relations discipline might better understand institutional change as well as the informational aspects of the current crisis in the LIO.

Courts around the world today are empowered to strike down unconstitutional constitutional amendments. But can a court strike down amendments that restore parts of the original constitution? The Appellate Division of the Bangladesh Supreme Court did precisely this in Bangladesh v. Asaduzzaman Siddiqui (2017), holding unconstitutional an amendment that restored the judicial removal provision that existed in the original 1972 Constitution. This article analyzes Siddiqui within the comparative constitutional amendment literature and the broader South Asian context. Despite the apparent incongruity of applying the basic structure doctrine to an original constitutional provision, we argue that Siddiqui is defensible on both theoretical and pragmatic grounds. The amendment that was invalidated in this case represented an unconstitutional departure from the judicial removal practice that had existed for several decades and was entrenched by a previous amendment, which “dismembered” the original constitution and safeguarded constitutional democracy in Bangladesh. At a regional level, Siddiqui is similar to recent judgments in India and Pakistan in which apex courts assert their control and limit political influence in judicial appointment and removal proceedings. Such judicial self-dealing, we argue, is more justified in Bangladesh and Pakistan than in India due to their checkered histories with democracy and political interference with judicial functions.

The central objective of the post-socialist European countries which are also Member States of the EU and Council of Europe, as proclaimed and enshrined in their constitutions before their official independence, is the establishment of a democracy based on the rule of law and effective legal protection of fundamental human rights and freedoms. In this article the author explains what, in his opinion, is the main problem and why these goals are still not sufficiently achieved: the ruthless simplification of the understanding of the social function and functioning of constitutional courts, which is narrow, rigid and holistically focused primarily or exclusively on the question of whether the judges of these courts are “left or right” in purely daily-political sense, and consequently, whether constitutional court decisions are taken (described, understood) as either “left or right” in purely and shallow daily-party-political sense/manner. With nothing else between and no other foundation. The author describes such rhetoric, this kind of superficial labeling/marking, such an approach towards constitutional law-making as a matter of unbearable and unthinking simplicity, and introduces the term A Populist Monster. The reasons that have led to the problem of this kind of populism and its devastating effects on the quality and development of constitutional democracy and the rule of law are analyzed clearly and critically.

After the democratization and independence of Slovenia, the Constitutional Court has generated the paradigm reform in the Slovenian constitutional system by protecting individual rights against the heritage of the former system. The constitutional judges are not blank slates, but individuals embedded in their private and professional environments. In the past three decades, the Court has delivered several seminal decisions concerning the protection of the rule of law, human rights, and constitutional democracy. What motivates constitutional judges to protect individual rights in some cases and show preference for the preservation of authority and stability of the existing legal system in others? The article is based on the empirical research measuring the presence of judicial ideology at the Constitutional Court of Slovenia in three mandates (1993–1997, 2002–2006, 2011–2016). The methodological and theoretical model aims to measure economic, social, and authoritarian dimensions of judicial ideology (three-fold judicial ideology model). The research group has analysed the decisions and separate opinions of the Constitutional Court from selected periods based on hypotheses provided by the model. This article intends to present and analyse the research results concerning the authoritarian dimension of judicial ideology. More specifically, it examines the level of authoritarianism of the Slovenian Constitutional Court in its judicial decision-making during the three mentioned mandates. Through the obtained empirical results, the paper seeks to strengthen fair, impartial, and independent functioning of the Slovenian Constitutional Court and its respective judges. The author wishes to acknowledge that the research for this article was co-financed by the Slovenian Research Agency, “Ideology at Courts: The Influence of Judges' World-views on Their Decisions”, no. J5-8240 (A). The author gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the research team (Matej Avbelj, Janez Sustarsic, Katarina Vatovec, Ana Jevsek Pezdir, Polona Batagelj, Maja Cigoj, Snežana Sustersic) to the research for this paper. The research on this article also benefited from the funding of the Slovenian Research Agency under the Research Project: “Holistic approach to business and human rights: a normative reform of Slovenian and international legal order”, no. JP-1790).”

The paper is devoted to the examination of the possibility of establishing a presidential republic in Russia after 1917. The authors have investigated the legal stance of the conservative-liberal and liberal-democratic camps in relation to the applicability of the American constitutional model for the organization of the highest executive power. The main part of the study is devoted to the analysis of the draft “Constitution of the Russian State” compiled by the Czech statesman Karel Kramář. The paper has examined the rules of the “Constitution of the Russian State” devoted to the legal status and powers of the Head of State. The study methodology includes such general scientific methods as analysis, comparison, techniques of logic, etc. Private legal methods allowed the authors to reveal and explain the meaning of the “Constitution of the Russian State” (the method of legal hermeneutics), as well as to compare the legal categories and institutions Karel Kramář used to form a presidential republic in Russia (the comparative-legal method). The authors conclude that the draft “Constitution of the Russian State” became one of the specific reflections of “white” constitutionalism.

The recent upsurge of populism has prompted a wave of theoretical reflections on constitutional democracy. Echoing Max Weber’s sociology of legitimate authority, Bruce Ackerman’s Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law stands out from the crowd by providing an ambitious trichotomy of constitutional legitimacy—revolutionary, establishmentarian and elitist—with a focus on the revolutionary pathway. Engaging with Ackerman’s theoretical modelling of the relationship between constitutionalism and legitimate authority, I argue that the resurgence of popular sovereignty, as embodied in We the People in populist rhetoric indicates the centrality of authenticity in constitutional democracy as constitutional authenticity is underpinned by the ethics of being true to the people’s originality. Yet, with the ethics of authenticity assuming its pathological form, the focus has been shifting from making sense of the constitution to the people’s self-identification with individual politicians. The latest wave of populism crystallises the anti-ethics of authenticity in our quest for lasting constitutional legitimacy.

Leo Strauss, in Philosophy and Law (1935), offers Platonic theocracy as a more just and stable political alternative to both liberalism and authoritarianism. Rather than merely a scholastic investigation of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, I read the book as a programmatic endorsement of a morally perfectionist political order: a divinely legitimated and rationally justified “true” or “beautiful” state. Since human beings require political community to suppress their evil inclinations and promote their disposition toward the good, Strauss criticizes liberalism for contending that government should remain neutral regarding good and evil and modern authoritarianism for effectively committing idolatry by politically instrumentalizing theology. I demonstrate that Strauss’s long-neglected book is particularly relevant for our own “postsecular age,” an age when adherents of religious orthodoxy increasingly demand concessions from liberal democracies and resurgent state authoritarianism frequently cloaks itself in religious trappings.

Gautam Bhatia, Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech Under the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2016. 347 pp. ₹750. ISBN: 9780199488643 Abhinav Chandrachud, Republic of Rhetoric: Free Speech and the Constitution of India. Gurgaon: Penguin Viking. 2017. 383 pp. ₹599. ISBN: 9780670090013 Anushka Singh, Sedition in Liberal Democracies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2018. 331 pp. ₹995. ISBN: 9780199481699

Summary Human rights are indivisible. The EU holds resolute tone against the challenges of universal human rights. As an adequate method of governance the EU acknowledges the rule of law that encompasses transparent and reliable legal system, an independent judiciary, prevention of arbitrary executive power; legal egalitarianism and respect for rights and freedoms of individuals. The concept of democracy determines the values behind the governance of a country. Thus, the EU’s vision of democracy comprises several principles: political equality, representative and participative democracy, which include fair elections, separation of power, effective checks and balances. However, despite the EU’s efforts to promote human rights, rule of law and democracy, some member States are still lagging behind the overall positive achievement. Hungary, who pick up illiberal democracy over established European values, has become the focus of attention.

Ethnoculture minorities around the world are demanding various forms of recognition and protection, often in the language of "group rights." Many commentators see this as a new and dangerous trend that threatens the fragile international consensus on the importance of individual rights. In many cases, group rights supplement and strengthen human rights, by responding to potential injustices that traditional rights doctrine cannot address. But in other cases, liberal states must tolerate unjust practices within a minority group. Drawing the line between the bad and the intolerable is one of the thorniest issues liberal democracies face. The chapter looks at the relationship between group and individual rights in the context of the claims of indigenous peoples in North America. In both the United States and Canada, these peoples have various group rights. For example, they have rights of self-government, under which they exercise control over health, education, family law, policing, criminal justice, and resource development.

This paper advances a functional analysis of the UK constitution. It explores how the UK constitution discharges three minimum ‘constituting’, ‘legitimating’ and ‘limiting’ functions that citizens living in modern liberal democracies may legitimately expect all constitutions – irrespective of form – to perform. This functional enquiry breaks with dominant trends in the legal scholarship that remain focused on theorising the constitution's underlying political or legal nature or, likewise, identifying its ultimate source of authority. In addition to offering a richer descriptive account of constitutional practice, this paper identifies, normatively, an institutional responsibility for Parliament to discharge the UK constitution's three minimum functions. Recognising that institutional responsibility unlocks fresh insights into two constitutional conundrums: the legitimacy of judicial review and the status of ‘constitutional statutes’. At the same time, it also exposes deficiencies and tensions in relation to the quality of Parliament's institutional performance on matters of minimum constitutional functioning.

Introduction. The article is devoted to the institution of the President of the Republic of Armenia and changes in its constitutional status over the past 30 years. To form the regulatory framework of the rule-of-law state, the adoption of the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia by referendum of 1995, amended by referenda of 2005 and 2015, was of key importance. At first, the institution of the President of the Republic of Armenia was strong enough: he was the head of the executive branch, he single-handedly appointed the Prime Minister, ministers, could unconditionally dissolve the legislative branch - the National Assembly, and make appointments in the judiciary system. That is, the principle of separation of powers was formal. The constitutional amendments of2005 limited the powers of the President of the Republic of Armenia. He had the right to appoint the Prime Minister only after agreement with the Parliament, he could dissolve the National Assembly in the cases and manner provided for in Art. 74.1. of the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia. For ten years, there was a form of semi-presidentalism in the Republic of Armenia, as in the Russian Federation. As a result of the constitutional amendments of 2015, in the context of the transition to parliamentary rule, the powers and functions of the President of the Republic of Armenia became strictly limited. He is elected by the Parliament, he cannot influence the decisions of the Parliament and the Government, he does not participate in the formation of the Government, which is not accountable to him. As a result, the office of the President of the Republic of Armenia is currently of ceremonial and representative nature. Materials and methods . The theoretical framework of this article consists of scientific works devoted to the institutions of the President of the Republic of Armenia and the Russian Federation. The authors also used the results of the analysis of law enforcement practice of the Republic of Armenia. The legal and regulatory framework of study was formed by the Constitutions and legislative acts of the Republic of Armenia, the Russian Federation and other states. Using both general research methods (historical, analytical) and special legal methods (system-structural, comparative-legal), the constitutional law of the Republic of Armenia and 30 years of experience in constitutional building were analyzed, as a result of which the existing theoretical and practical problems were identified, certain conclusions and proposals were made. Study results . The President, being the head of state, monitors compliance with the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia /Art. 123/, therefore, he should have separate functions and certain instruments. To exclude the dependence of the President on the parliamentary majority, the article proposes to change the mechanism of his election: to amend Article 125 of the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia and grant the right to elect the President of the Republic of Armenia to all those extraparliamentary paries that took part in the parliamentary elections, but were not elected to the Parliament, receiving between three and five percent of the total votes. It is considered optimal to assign them 30% of the total number of mandates of deputies of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia. The governing body of each party elects delegates to participate in presidential elections. In the event of such elections, considering also that, according to the Electoral Code of the Republic of Armenia, 30% of seats in the Parliament belong to the opposition, the President's dependence on the parliamentary majority will be excluded, and, in conditions of limited authority, he, at least, can easily put forward the topics of social and political discourse and influence public opinion, express his opinion on the appointment of the Prime Minister, and at least once a year, without fail, address the Parliament and the people. Discussion and conclusions. Strengthening the institution of the President in the parliamentary form of government can contribute to enhancing the role of the head of state as an arbitrator, effective activity of the Parliament and the Government of the Republic of Armenia and understanding the whole institution supported by the state budget.

To what extent has the COVID-19 outbreak, and the augmented use of health surveillance technology that has resulted from it, altered international conceptions of civil liberties, privacy, and democracy? This article examines how global patterns of liberal democracy have been and could be affected by the pandemic. In China, the outbreak has strengthened a pre-existing techno-authoritarian project aimed at prevention and control of threats to both public health and public order. Certain features of the international system such as China's major power status, its global economic role, and its leadership in international organizations suggest that China's model of illiberal pandemic response could diffuse worldwide. Other factors, however—such as the incomparability of China's political system to many other countries in the contemporary international system—suggest more limited diffusion potential. To date, the pandemic has largely augmented existing trends, meaning that autocracies have been likely to respond in ways that infringe upon citizen rights, and weak democracies have exhibited some risk of democratic erosion and pandemic-associated autocratization. In these cases, however, factors other than surveillance have been central to processes of democratic decay. Conversely, a large number of consolidated democracies have employed surveillance, but have managed to navigate the initial stages of crisis without significantly compromising democratic standards. In these cases, surveillance technology has been fenced in by democratic institutions and rule of law, and norms, institutions, and public opinion have worked together to facilitate pandemic responses that are (on balance) proportional, limited in time and scope, and subject to democratic oversight. This suggests that international relations may need to separate the pandemic's effects on democracy from its effects on liberalism, and that care must be taken to identify the precise mechanisms that link pandemic response to various components of liberal democracy.

Civil society organizations and individual volunteers were in many instances the first responders to the so-called ‘European humanitarian refugee crisis’. From 2015 onwards, they were celebrated by some as heroes. Meanwhile, during this same period, national and EU law enforcement agencies served to relabel civil society actors across a range of contexts as potential ‘migrant smugglers’–direct facilitators of conduits of irregular migrant flows, or a pull-factor by default through their services. The shift in rhetoric was met with a shift in policing practices: in Italy and Greece, among other EU member states, humanitarian acts were reframed from life-saving obligations to be met and commended, to administrative–and in some cases—criminal risks to be monitored, deterred and punished. This article builds on previous research to consider how since 2018, civil society actors in Italy and Greece have faced increasing demands and pressures for registration, coordination and financial transparency, and how these have profound repercussions on humanitarian and human rights work with, for and by refugees and other migrants. The article outlines four main opportunity costs of the policing of humanitarian actors as a strategy to prevent mobility of refugees and other migrants. Firstly, such measures pose a threat to civil society’s independence and impartiality from government interference; in doing so, they impact the efficiency of operations and disincentivize certain humanitarian actors from conducting life-saving work. Secondly, they have repercussions on trust between the law enforcement and civil society which may lessen the chances of migrants and those that serve them from sharing crucial information to stop and investigate ongoing violent crimes. Thirdly, this strategy leads to the politicization of the criminal justice system which undermines public faith in liberal democracy. Finally, resources channelled into investigating civil society actors funnel away resources from the focus on high-profile criminality. Given the pervasive human rights abuses committed against irregular migrants and asylum seekers, we argue that this misdirected policy equates to picking ‘low-hanging fruit’ while the orchard burns.