What’s New in Public Law

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—Silvia Talavera Lodos, PhD Candidate, School of Advanced Studies Sant’Anna.

—Benjamin Nurkić, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Law University of Tuzla and a member of the Constitutional Committee of the House of Representatives of the Parliament of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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In this weekly feature, I-CONnect publishes a curated reading list of developments in public law. “Developments” may include a selection of links to news, high court decisions, new or recent scholarly books and articles, and blog posts from around the public law blogosphere.

To submit relevant developments for our weekly feature on “What’s New in Public Law,” please email iconnecteditors@gmail.com.

Developments in Constitutional Courts

1. Croatia’s Constitutional Court rules that President Milanović is ineligible to run for Prime Minister in the upcoming election unless he resigns.
2. The Colombian Air Force acknowledges the ruling of the Colombian Constitutional Court that deems the article of the law changing its name to ‘Colombian Aerospace Force’, unconstitutional.
3. Senegal’s Supreme Court declares inadmissible the opposition parties’ appeal to postpone the upcoming presidential elections in March 2024.
4. Progress towards marriage equality in Japan as Sapporo High Court rules ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.
5. Ugandan Appeal Court upholds decision to block registration of LGBTQ rights advocacy group.
6. The Kosovo Court ruling on the Visoki Decani Monastery has finally been implemented, almost eight years later.

In the News

1. Hours after the US Supreme Court authorized Texas to temporarily enforce an immigration law allowing the arrest of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, an Appeals Court put it on hold again.
2. The Venice Commission adopted a Rule of Law opinion on the requirements of amnesty, with special mention to the Spanish amnesty law.
3. The Thai Election Commission plans to dissolve the Move Forward party, winner of last year’s general election, on suspicion that the party would want to overthrow Thailand’s constitutional monarchy.
4. Putin secured another term in office with the largest victory margin seen in a presidential election in post-Soviet Russia.
5. Indonesian presidential candidate, Anies Baswedan, intends to challenge last month’s election results by lodging a case at the country’s Constitutional Court.
6. Legislation aiming to reverse The Gambia’s groundbreaking prohibition on female genital mutilation is making progress in parliament.
7. Türkiye Constitutional Court elected new president, Kadir Özkaya.
8. Ecuadorian movement, comprising feminist and human rights organizations, appeals to the Constitutional Court to decriminalize abortion.

New Scholarship

1. Alma Begicevic and Jennifer Balint (2024), Constricted rights and imagined identities: Peace and accountability processes and constitution-making in Bosnia and Herzegovina (this article argues that the post-war ethnonational power-sharing arrangement is blocking the transition of Bosnia and Herzegovina to consolidated democracy). 
2. Gábor Halmai (2024) Rule of Law Backsliding and Memory Politics in Hungary (this article analyzes the relationship between the rule of law backsliding and the lack of substantive transition in Hungary).
3. Ran Hirschl, Yaniv Roznai (eds) (2024) Deciphering the Genome of Constitutionalism The Foundations and Future of Constitutional Identity (this book deals with the rising trend of invoking constitutional identity from different angles). 
4. Ardi Imseis (2023) The United Nations and the Question of Palestine: Rule by Law and the Structure of International Legal Subalternity (This book explores the UN’s management of the longest-running problem on its agenda, critically assessing tensions between the organization’s position and international law).
5. Maja Sahadžić (2024), Why rights should not be considered (entirely) constricted and why identities are not exactly imagined: A reply to Alma Begicevic and Jennifer Balint (the article explores why the ethnonational power-sharing post-war institutions building in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not sui generis then it has been frequently used in fragmenting systems with competing identities).

Calls for Papers and Announcements

1. The Graduate School DynamInt (Humboldt University) and the Amsterdam Law School (University of Amsterdam) will host the annual DynamInt Doctoral Conference, taking place on 28-29 August 2024 in Amsterdam.
2. School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool is accepting applications for the International Law and Human Rights Unit’s Summer School on the Law of the Council of Europe.
3. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law seeks contributions that critically examine tensions in law and legal linguistics.
4. The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law is interested in including an entry on the Polish Constitutional Tribunal in its collection. If you are a constitutional law scholar or practitioner specializing in Polish law, please contact contact@mpeccol.de.
5. Florida State University College of Law and Loyola University Chicago School of Law will co-host the Fifteenth Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium at the Florida State University College of Law Campus, 425 West Jefferson Street, Tallahassee, FL 32306.
6. The University of Texas at Austin will host the interim meeting of the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on Comparative Judicial Studies on 24-26 October 2024. The topic will be ‘Courts and their Interactions with Politics’. The submission deadline is on April 2 2024.

Elsewhere Online

1. Henry Barrett, The Sovereign Protection Office as the Tip of the Iceberg (15 March 2024).
2. Juan Ruiz Ramos, W.A. and Others v. Italy: Is a cry for help not enough to trigger non-refoulement? (05 March 2024).
3. Dejen Messele, A Sympathy Borne out of Legal Identity? (Re)Viewing Ethiopia’s Move to Recognize Somaliland’s Statehood from a Different Angle (18 March 2024).
4. Harun Išerić, Foreign judges on the Constitutional Court of BiH: Should they stay or should they go (06 February 2024).
5. Robby Houben, FIFA Transfer System Rules in front of the Court (18 March 2024).