Tag: Democratic backsliding
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A Nightmare of Emergency Martial Law in South Korea – Followed by Charges of Insurrection and Impeachment
—Yoomin Won, Associate Professor at Seoul National University School of Law On December 3, 2024, the ghost of martial law, which had been thought to have disappeared, reappeared after 45 years, haunting the people like a nightmare. The constitutional power to demand the lifting of martial law — a safeguard in the 1987 Constitution —…
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Local Authorities as Guarantors of the Rule of Law: Recent Developments in the Council of Europe
—Tania Groppi, Università degli Studi di Siena [Editor’s Note: This is one of our ICONnect columns. For more on our 2024 columnists, see here.] Local government is usually absent from the theoretical debates on the pillars of constitutional law, such as human rights, separation of powers, rule of law.
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The Mass Removal of Constitutional Judges in El Salvador: A New Case of Constitutional Authoritarian-Populism
—José Ignacio Hernández G., Fellow, Growth Lab-Center for International Development Harvard; Professor of Administrative Law at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello; Invited Professor, Universidad Castilla-La Mancha, and Tashkent University. In just a few hours, between the evening of May 1 and the early morning of May 2, the Legislative Assembly in El Salvador removed the five…
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Constitutional Quantum Mechanics and a Change of Government in Malaysia
—Dian AH Shah and Andrew Harding, National University Singapore Faculty of Law Democratic backsliding has become quite the flavour of the decade, unfortunately, as the pages of this blog reveal all too starkly: Hungary, Poland, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and many other instances across the world.[1]
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Bolsonaro’s First Year: Trying to Erode Democracy
—Antonio Moreira Maués, Federal University of Pará The first year of the Bolsonaro government had poor results in the economy and was marked by a high degree of political instability. Although he managed to approve pension reform, Bolsonaro does not have a stable parliamentary base in the National Congress[1] and has also lost a…
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ICON Book Review: Piotr Mikuli on Wojciech Sadurski’s “Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown”
[Editor’s Note: This book review by Piotr Mikuli of Wojciech Sadurski’s new book, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, is forthcoming in the next issue of ICON.] Wojciech Sadurski. Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown. Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. ISBN 978-0198840503 The book’s title refers to the expression “constitutional breakdown”, which seems to reflect the author’s profound thoughts regarding…
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The Party Fragmentation Paradox in Brazil: A Shield Against Authoritarianism?
—Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, University of Brasília and National Council for Scientific and Technological Development Brazil features possibly the most fragmented party system in the world. At this current legislative term, there are 25 parties with representation in the Lower House, and 16 in the Senate.
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Indonesia’s Pesta Demokrasi in the Face of Regressing Constitutional Democracy
—Dian A H Shah, National University Singapore Faculty of Law [Editor’s note: This is one of our biweekly I-CONnect columns. Columns, while scholarly in accordance with the tone of the blog and about the same length as a normal blog post, are a bit more “op-ed” in nature than standard posts.
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Are Constitutional Democracies Really in Crisis?
—Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Harvard Law School It may seem churlish for one of the co-editors of the recently published Constitutional Democracies in Crisis? (with Mark Graber and Sanford Levinson) to raise questions about what readers might take to be the book’s basic conceptualization, that we are experiencing a widespread crisis for…