Constitutional Rights

The Aadhaar Project is suffering from many “Vices and Illegalities”. These include Civil Liberties Violations, Unconstitutional E-Surveillance Issues, Data security and Cyber Security Issues, Compulsory Nature of Aadhaar, Unaccountable Intelligence Agencies, Foreign E-Surveillance Threats, Telecom Security Issues, Integration with Surveillance projects like NATGRID, Unconstitutional Biometrics Collections, etc. All these aspects make the Aadhaar Project an Unconstitutional Project that was required to be Scrapped by the Modi Government.

Se propone una interpretación restrictiva del Código Penal en relación con el delito de coacción a la huelga, que sea compatible con el derecho fundamental a la huelga y la libertad sindical.  Se analizan críticamente las las objeciones suscitadas desde interpretaciones jurídicas neo-)liberales.

The Egyptian authorities have resorted to every means in their power to convince people to vote yes in the constitutional referendum that begins Tuesday.

Televisions and radios offered daily editorials and debates about the merits of the new Basic Law, including new guarantees of individual rights. However, the government has simultaneously expanded its crackdown on dissidents beyond all borders of Islam voice.

A few days ago a court sentenced eight revolutionary activists to two years in prison in Alexandria for organizing a march without notice to the authorities, as it is ordered by a new law restricting demonstrations. Three other activists considered a symbol of the revolt that ousted Hosni Mubarak in 2011 were jailed for participating in a civil disobedience campaign against this law last month.

Harassment did not spare journalists. Three journalists from Al Jazeera, including an Australian reporter, were arrested on December 30 and then were charged with providing information that  harmed “national security” .

The anti-terrorist hysteria included authorities investigating a telecommunications company accused of using a puppet in which it supposedly sent coded messages to terrorist cells.

Undoubtedly, the Muslim Brotherhood, officially designated as a “terrorist organization”, are the group that has suffered the most repression. Security forces have killed hundreds of its followers after the coup and its leaders have been imprisoned.

Besides the legal and media fronts of the current battle there are now the economic and social ones. The government has frozen the assets of 800 leaders of the Brotherhood and has gained control of 87 schools. In addition, the Central Bank has frozen the accounts of more than a thousand NGOs accused of having links with the Islamist movement.

The decision was highly controversial because it includes some organizations with a long history and presence in the territory. “Many of the organizations on the list have no connection with the Brotherhood. In fact, their foundation precedes that of the brotherhood itself.

However, “they do have a proselytizing purpose,” says Mustafa Khalil, a specialist in Islamist movements and a social researcher. The inclusion of these groups may be motivated by the work of overzealous authorities and their willingness to extend their harassment of other Islamic groups.

In the world of constitutional law, theory and practice are moving in opposite directions.  As a matter of legal practice, since the end of the Second World War an extensive and growing literature produced by lawyers, judges and political scientists acknowledges the emergence of a ground-breaking constitutional paradigm.  In states as diverse as Germany, South Africa, and Canada, this modern constitutional paradigm integrates (1) a written constitution that exhaustively establishes the conditions for the valid exercise of all public authority, (2) a constitutionally entrenched bill of rights that delineates the right of persons, by virtue of their dignity, to just governance, and (3) a politically independent judicial body to which any individual can bring a constitutional complaint challenging the validity of any exercise of public authority that violates a constitutional right.  As a matter of theoretical justification, however, this phenomenon remains enigmatic.  Its leading defenders, such as Ronald Dworkin, argue that modern constitutionalism is justified because it contributes to the realization of some morally desirable outcome, for example, elevated levels of public debate or just decisions.  Such justifications are open to a devastating skeptical challenge.  As Jeremy Waldron has observed, the various benefits that constitutionalism is purported to bring may be realized in its absence, while the presence of constitutional arrangements provide no guarantee that the benefits will accrue.
This essay formulates an original justification of modern constitutionalism that is not vulnerable to this line of objection.  Instead of justifying modern constitutionalism by appealing to benefits that could, in principle, be achieved in its absence, the author argues that modern constitutionalism is a systematic response to a moral problem involving public authority that every legal system must address, but that cannot be addressed apart from the legal and institutional structure of a modern constitutional state.  The problem – common to all precursors of modern constitutionalism – is not that the government necessarily exercises public authority in a manner that violates the inherent dignity and fundamental rights of the ruled, but that in the event of a violation one or more persons are left without legal recourse.  When one suffers a public wrong at the hands of the government, the government is both a party to the dispute and judge in its own cause.  Accordingly, the government might ignore one’s grievance, deny that the grievance amounts to a wrong, or even concede the commission of a wrong but withhold a corresponding remedy.  To address this problem, one requires a legal and institutional structure that enables any individual to challenge the validity of any exercise of public authority by raising a constitutional complaint.  This is exactly what the modern constitutional state – and only the modern constitutional state –provides. 

Within the debate on freedom of religion in Turkey, we can identify two distinct generations, both of which are alive with an oscillating degree of vibrancy. The first generation of debate has evolved around the question on the proper place of Islam in the secular nation-state; while the second one has encompassed the plural concerns of protecting the rights and freedoms, pertaining to religion or belief, of a diverse multitude, under the rule of law. The first generation of debate resulted in a dual deadlock: Freedom
to religion versus freedom from religion. The second generation is informed by a pluralisation of parties and concerns. The first generation has produced well-established results in jurisprudence, where the effect of the second generation is far from being significant. Yet, as this paper will explain in conclusion, we have good reasons to expect the second generation to prevail over the first one.

Keywords
freedom of religion; freedom to religion; freedom from religion; secularism; Turkish constitutional law

No weakening, but rather an expansion, of statehood can be observed in the contemporary world. This does not, on the other hand, imply that extensive forms of constitutional ordering do not exist outside the realm of states. Instead, the evolution of world society has been characterized by a protracted dual movement where the expansion and densification of statehood and autonomous forms of transnational ordering gradually emerged in a mutually constitutive fashion. One implication of this is that neither the concept of the state nor the concept of nonstate transnational entities is adequately capable of delineating the object of constitutional analysis. Instead, the concept of normative orders has been introduced as an overarching category capable of identifying the contexts within which constitutional ordering emerges.
Subsequently, a distinction between the internal and external dimensions of the law of normative orders has been introduced, specifying them as respectively oriented towards establishing internal condensation of a given normative order and external compatibility between different normative orders. With this background, a framework for the analysis of constitutional frameworks of normative orders is developed. The central element is a distinction among three dimensions: First, a constitution implies a coupling between a constitutional object, in the form of a hierarchical organization of a given normative order capable of reproducing an autonomous source of authority, and a concordant legal framework. Second, constitutionalization implies a coupling between an internal reconstruction of an external constitutional subject within the constitutional object, and the register of legal rights, establishing a framework for exchanges between the constitutional object and the wider world as represented by the constitutional subject. Third, constitutionalism denotes the institutionalization of a double function, in the form of a principle-based and legally fortified striving toward universal inclusion, providing a sense of direction in time through an articulated form of constitutional consciousness.
The insights developed are briefly illustrated by the case of the global Fairtrade Certification System.