The Universal Model

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-208
Author(s):  
Ngoc Son Bui
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Previous Experience ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Universal Model ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Limited Power ◽  
Global Norms ◽  
Constitution Making

This chapter investigates the making of Vietnam’s 2013 Constitution. Compared with previous experience in Vietnam and with the experience in the other four socialist countries, the 2013 experience features the local adherence to universal norms in the process and substance of socialist constitutional change. This model of socialist constitutional change is, therefore, characterized as the universal model. The adherence to these universal norms informs and legitimatizes the process of the constitution-making. But, the global norms are contextualized by their intricate interaction with socialist, local elements: the party’s reformist program, legislature’s constituent power, party’s control of participation, and the party’s control of international involvement. Procedurally, the interplay of global and socialist factors results in a more open national constitutional dialogue and a less authoritarian paradigm of constitutional imposition. The three aspects of dissonance (internal to the socialist constitution of Vietnam, between the socialist constitutional ideals and external Vietnamese reality, and between the socialist and global constitutional norms) result in the pragmatic incorporation of universal ideas, principles, and institutions into the socialist Constitution of Vietnam, e.g. people’s constituent power, limited power, and human rights.

The Juridical People

2020 ◽  
pp. 262-294
Author(s):  
Joel Colón-Ríos
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
The People ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Amendment Rule ◽  
Constitution Making

This chapter argues that to the extent that a constituent assembly is not a sovereignty entity but a means for the exercise of constituent power, it can be subject to substantive limits arising from a constituent mandate. Part I of the chapter examines the place of the imperative mandate in contemporary constitutional change. Part II analyses the extent to which ‘the people’, understood as a juridical entity, could be said to engage in constituent action through an electoral exercise. It examines whether, during an episode of constitutional change, the electorate necessarily acts as a state organ (a view exemplified in the work of a number of constitutional theories as well as in some judicial decisions). In answering that question in the negative, the chapter develops a distinction between constitutional and constituent referendums. Part III explores the process that led to the convocation of the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly of 1999. In that process, the court recognized the electorate’s right to convene an extraordinary constitution-making body through a referendum that took place outside of the established amendment rule. However, the constituent mandate contained in the referendum’s question was transgressed by the assembly, which assumed sovereign authority. The courts, relying on the theory of constituent power, later sanctioned that transgression.

Óscar Romero and the Politics of Sainthood

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Holy See ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Face ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
The One

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization

The Internationalization Of Human Rights And The Importance Of Normative Dialogues Between International And National Courts

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Mariane Morato Stival ◽  
Marcos André Ribeiro ◽  
Daniel Gonçalves Mendes da Costa
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Rights Protection ◽  
Rights Protection ◽  
National Courts ◽  
European Court ◽  
Differences Of Opinion ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

This article intends to analyze in the context of the complexity of the process of internationalization of human rights, the definitions and tensions between cultural universalism and relativism, the essence of human rights discourse, its basic norms and an analysis of the normative dialogues in case decisions involving violations of human rights in international tribunals such as the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and national courts. The well-established dialogue between courts can bring convergences closer together and remove differences of opinion on human rights protection. A new dynamic can occur through a complementarity of one court with respect to the other, even with the different characteristics between the legal orders.

Ummah’s Rights or Human Rights? Universalism, Individualism, and Islamic Ethics in the Twenty-first Century

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Islamic Ethics ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Societal Needs ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”

Constituent Power

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nimer Sultany
Keyword(s):  
Political Order ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Constitution Making ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter argues that scholarly debates about constituent power presuppose a distinction between constituent power and constitutional form that is neither theoretically compelling nor practically illuminating. In contrast to constitutionalists, it argues that constituent power is inexhaustible, the revolution not being reducible to an event and thus constitution-making fails to terminate constituent power. In contrast to populists, it argues that constituent power does not operate in a constitutional vacuum because the judiciary imposes constitutional continuity through unwritten constitutional principles. The judiciary also polices will formation during revolutionary upheaval, as reflected in Egyptian and Tunisian judicial rulings and legal debates relating to the formation and functioning of constituent assemblies. Finally, the overlap between constitutive and legislative functions in the practice of constituent assemblies, and the deflation of the constituent power’s political agency are inconsistent with theories that present constituent power as an unbounded political agency that establishes a new political order.

The SADC Tribunal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Tendayi Achiume
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Southern African Development Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Decision ◽  
African Development ◽  
Sociopolitical Context ◽  
Judicial Lawmaking

This chapter uses the trajectory of the Southern African Development Community (“SADC”) Tribunal to chart sociopolitical constraints on international judicial lawmaking. It studies the SADC Tribunal backlash case, which paved the way for a curtailment of the Tribunal’s authority, stripping the Tribunal of both private access and its jurisdiction over human rights. Showing how jurisprudential engagement with sociopolitical context plays a significant role in explaining the Tribunal's loss of authority, the chapter introduces the concept of sociopolitical dissonance. Sociopolitical dissonance is a state that results when a legal decision contradicts or undermines deeply held norms that a given society or community forms on the basis of its social, political, and economic history. Sociopolitical resonance, on the other hand, describes the quality of affirming or according with a given society's norms as informed by its sociopolitical history.

To Discriminate in Order to Fight Discrimination

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores Morondo Taramundi
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
The Other ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
European Court ◽  
Main Technique ◽  
Antidiscrimination Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Paradoxical Results ◽  
Conflicts Of Rights

This chapter analyses arguments regarding conflicts of rights in the field of antidiscrimination law, which is a troublesome and less studied area of the growing literature on conflicts of rights. Through discussion of Ladele and McFarlane v. The United Kingdom, a case before the European Court of Human Rights, the chapter examines how the construction of this kind of controversy in terms of ‘competing rights’ or ‘conflicts of rights’ seems to produce paradoxical results. Assessment of these apparent difficulties leads the discussion in two different directions. On the one hand, some troubles come to light regarding the use of the conflict of rights frame itself in the field of antidiscrimination law, particularly in relation to the main technique (‘balancing of rights’) to solve them. On the other hand, some serious consequences of the conflict of rights frame on the development of the antidiscrimination theory of the ECtHR are unearthed.

Empire after Liberalism: The Transatlantic Right and Identitarian War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Male ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The One

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.

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