Category: Mark Kende hp

An Associated Press Report states that Egypt’s Constitutional Court has supported the right of women to serve as administrative court judges despite conservative opposition. The ruling addressed a conflict in the State Council, which is the country’s highest administrative court. According to AP, the Constitutional Court said that all citizens were equal before the law.

The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has apparently reversed an anti-terror law that allowed authorities to keep information about certain telephone calls and emails for up to six months. The Court said this was a “grave intrusion” on privacy rights. 35,000 Germans supposedly joined in the appeal and the Court has ordered deletion of the…

Professor Randy Peerenboom has an important article now available on SSRN regarding Chinese constitutionalism. It’s called “The Social Foundations of China’s Living Constitution.” The URL is: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1542463Here’s the abstract: The article examines the social foundations of constitutionalism in China, focusing on constitutions as a historical response to particular events.

There is a wonderful resource for those interested in the issue of socio-economic rights in South Africa and other countries that may not be well known. It’s called the ESR Review, which stands for Economic and Social Rights in South Africa.

The Supreme Court of Canada in October of 2009 issued an important freedom of religion decision in Alberta v. Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, 2009 SCC 37. The Court rejected arguments that the Hutterites should be exempt from having photographs on their driver’s licenses.

My first post showed how the South African Constitutional Court used a “reasonableness” test in assessing whether the state had met its constitutional socio-economic obligations. My second post explained that the Court recently required the government to “meaningfully engage” with vulnerable parties to try to resolve socio-economic disputes.

In a post last week, I argued that the South African Constitutional Court’s first stage of socio-economic rights decisions threaded a needle by enforcing such rights, yet accommodating separation of powers concerns. This new post discusses the second of the Court’s three stages.