Tag: COVID-19
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Are Quebec and Canada having a “Schmittian” (or Iheringian) moment?
—Maxime St-Hilaire, University of Sherbrooke, Faculty of Law On June 16, 2019, the Quebec legislature invoked Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in order to suspend, with regards to the Act respecting the laicity (secularism)of the State (ALS) that it was passing, all constitutional rights and freedoms which this section permits.
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Human Rights in Africa in the Context of Covid-19
–Sean Molloy, Research Associate, Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University In response to Covid-19, countries across Africa are declaring a state of emergency (these include Botswana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Botswana, Ethiopia and Senegal, to name a few). Doing so allows the authorities, in times of urgent necessity, to take actions necessary to safeguard national security, maintain…
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A Liberal Darling or an Inadvertent Hand to Dictators? Open-Ended Lawmaking and Taiwan’s Legal Response to the Covid Pandemic
–Ming-Sung Kuo, Associate Professor, University of Warwick, UK. Email: M-S.Kuo@warwick.ac.uk Taiwan has recently received unusual international coverage for its stellar performance in the global fight against the Covid pandemic. It is noted that the Taiwan society and government drew hard lessons from their painful experience in the 2003 Sars outbreak.
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Lies in the Time of Corona: Attempts to Inoculate Truth from a Pandemic
—Andrea Scoseria Katz, NYU School of Law [Editor’s note: This is one of our biweekly I-CONnect columns. For more information about our four columnists for 2020, please click here.] The problem with lying in politics, the philosopher Hannah Arendt once pointed out, isn’t that people start to take the lies seriously, but rather that “nobody…
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“Constitutional Dismemberment” and Strategic Deconstitutionalization in Times of Crisis: Beyond Emergency Powers
—Cristiano Paixão & Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, University of Brasília It could not be otherwise: Covid-19 is the topic of the moment in constitutional law. A series of debates over the impacts of this external factor on the functioning of democratic or authoritarian states, the leadership or not of their respective governments to face such severe…
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The Role of Constitutional Justice in Times of Crisis: The Case of Ecuador
—Andrés Cervantes, Pompeu Fabra University As I write these lines, I am thinking about the complex situation that Ecuador is currently facing because of the national emergency declared over the aggressive progression of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, some of the thoughts expressed here may be also relevant to other Latin-American nations as the Global South…
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States’ Reactions to COVID-19 Pandemic: An Overview of the Belgian Case
–Frédéric Bouhon, Andy Jousten, Xavier Miny, and Emmanuel Slautsky. Corresponding Author: Emmanuel Slautsky (Emmanuel.Slautsky@ulb.be) For the past weeks, national and international news has been dominated by a single subject: a large part of the world is affected by the pandemic of the infectious disease called Covid-19, which is due to the spread of a coronavirus.
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The Collision between Bolsonaro and the Sovereignty of Science: The Courts Step In
—João Vitor Cardoso, University of Chile Faculty of Law[1] Introduction On Saturday, March 28, a federal court in Rio de Janeiro banned the Brazilian government from disseminating propaganda against confinement measures aimed at controlling the coronavirus pandemic. The federal judge gave the government 24 hours to publish an official statement explaining that its “Brazil Cannot…
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ICON Guest Editorial: Without a New European Patriotism, the Decline of the EU is Inevitable
On 26 March, an utterly divided EU emerged from the European Council dedicated to European measures aimed at managing the severest crisis since 1929, one far worse than the 2012-2017 crisis. The coronavirus pandemic and the transpiring economic and social crises present Europe with an extraordinary opportunity: to decide to move towards a deeper unity,…
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Redefining the Right to Privacy in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic
—Dr. Olga Hałub-Kowalczyk, Chair of Constitutional Law, Faculty of Law, Administration and Economics, University of Wrocław, Poland Nobody needs to be convinced of the direct impact on human rights flowing from the pandemic induced by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The necessity of reorganizing the state and way it works goes hand in hand with sudden changes…