Volume 8, Issue 1

This paper analyzes the Venezuelan denunciation of the American Convention on Human Rights from a constitutional and an international approach, taking into account the Venezuelan Constitution, the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights and the interpretative rules of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), to demonstrate that, even with the existence of article 78 of the American Convention, the denunciation is contrary to the Inter-American System as a system of two levels and therefore it shall be considered unlawful and invalid.

Can a constitutional norm be unconstitutional? This idea seems, at first sight as a self-contradiction. Unconstitutionality is commonly referred to those ordinary laws, inferior to the constitution, which violate it. Constitutional norms, in contrast, carry an equal normative status as the constitution itself and other constitutional provisions. The question of unconstitutional constitutional norms recently arose in the Czech Republic. On 10 September 2009, the Czech Constitutional Court declared Constitutional Act no 195/2009 Coll, on Shortening the Fifth Term of Office of the Chamber of Deputies to be unconstitutional. The Czech Constitutional Court held that the constitutional act was an individual, specific decision and retroactive, thus violating the unamendability provision (Art 9(2)) in the Constitution, which prohibits amendments to the essential requirement for a democratic state governed by the rule of law. This article analyses the Czech Constitutional Court’s decision in a broader comparative and theoretical perspective and focuses, mainly, on four issues: first, the Czech Constitutional Court’s authority to substantively review constitutional norms; second, the appropriate standard of review when exercising judicial review of constitutional norms; third, the ‘individual, specific’ character of the constitutional act; and fourth, its alleged retroactive application. The article claims that while the Czech Constitutional Court was generally correct in claiming an authority to substantively review even constitutional norms, this was not the appropriate case in which to annul a constitutional act.

The New Zealand Food Bill is being passed amidst stern criticism of its content and the influence of multi-national corporations and the Codex Alimentarius Commission, whose food-safety standards motivated the bill. These concerns illustrate the large democratic and legitimisation deficits in global governance. One response to these criticisms and concerns is global administrative law, which focuses on promoting administrative law tools to enhance accountability. However, an examination of the Food Bill reinforces two main critiques of global administrative law: that it excludes addressing substance of international law and brackets democracy. I argue the limited GAL approach cannot be justified and the significant gaps in its approach require that it engage with democracy. I analyse the possibilities of global administrative law to engage with (to acknowledge and adopt) two theories of global democracy - deliberative and cosmopolitan - using the Food Bill as a case study.

Since the elections of 2010, the right-wing coalition has a supermajority in the Hungarian Parliament, and is able to amend the Constitution without any further ado. The Constitution became a part of the political tool-kit which may and is amended as the government needs it to be amended. Under these circumstances, the Constitutional Court cannot be a vigorous guardian of constitutional values, and the Parliament did everything in order to housetrain the formerly widely acknowledged Constitutional Court: cut back its powers filled the bench with rather loyal justices and blocked the critical decisions. The present article is aimed to describe and to critically analyze these strategies in a national and European context.