Childhood Statelessness: Critiquing International Norms and Enforcement Strategies

Over the past decade, there has been renewed interest in and commitment to resolving the endemic problem of statelessness, most clearly exemplified by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ Global Action Plan to End Statelessness 2014-24, which sets out to end statelessness by 2024. Despite the plethora of recent attention to questions of citizenship, its converse, the problem of statelessness and its effect on children, has not been adequately investigated. This paper attempts to delineate the causes of childhood statelessness in particular and to analyze the international legal framework for reducing and preventing it. It examines how statelessness is created, how it persists and why it brings with it the deprivations it does. It then subjects the customary and modern international legal norms governing childhood statelessness and enforcement strategies at Global level to close scrutiny and identifies the clearly discernible drawbacks and road blocks. It concludes with suggestions, inter alia, to make the jus soli citizenship a mandatory default clause in the citizenship laws of every country, to further prioritize birth registration and data collection and to strengthen the UPR process and reporting procedure.

Conditional Decisions as Instrument Guarding the Supremacy of the Constitution (Analysis of conditional decisions of Indonesian Constitutional Court in 2003 – 2017)

The function of the Indonesian Constitutional Court as the guardian of the constitution is mainly conducted through the judicial review authority. Since 2003 to April 2021, the Constitutional Court has received and decided 1392 petitions over judicial review. In its dictums, the Constitutional Court often declares conditionally constitutional or conditionally unconstitutional (conditional decision). Conditional decision is a decision of the Court that declare the reviewed norm conditionally constitutional or unconstitutional. The norm is constitutional if interpreted pursuant to the Court interpretation, or the norm is unconstitutional if interpreted in certain ways. This research is aimed to investigate the criteria of judicial review decisions which declares conditionally constitutional and conditionally unconstitutional in accordance with the characteristics of norms of the law reviewed. The analysis was limited to the Court decisions from 2003 to 2017. The research result indicates that distinguishing characters of norms reviewed have no correlation with the option between conditionally constitutional or conditionally unconstitutional. Conditionally Constitutional Decision was used by the court before replaced by Conditionally Unconstitutional Decision due to the weakness of decision implementation. For conditionally unconstitutional decisions are connected to the substance of the decision which create new norm that replace, limit, or elaborate reviewed norm. Conditional decision is still required as a consequence of the following three aspects: enforcement of the supremacy of the constitution, presumption of validity, and strengthening the execution of Constitutional Court decisions.

The History and Origin of Fraud as a Defect in Consent in Contractual Relationships

Fraud is a specific type of defect in consent that manifests the purpose of one of the parties to establish a contractual relationship through deceptive actions. As such, fraud is an unlawful and unethical action that emerged beginning with some of the earliest agreements in human society. Moreover, the practical treatment of fraud is likely to have occurred since the genesis of its appearance. More appropriate and advanced treatment of fraud can be seen after the implementation of the first legal systems, which focused on contractual relationships. Fraud in contractual relationships will be examined starting with Babylonian, Ancient Greek, Roman, and Islamic law and will continue with a focus on Albanian customary law and modern laws implemented in Kosovo. Furthermore, in this article, we will show how the treatment of fraud has evolved in the legal framework in Kosovo.