Tag: emergency powers
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South Korean Constitutional Court Upholds Impeachment of President Yoon for Abusing Emergency Power
—Yoomin Won, Seoul National University School of Law [Editor’s Note: This is one of our ICONnect columns. For more information on our 2025 columnists, see here.] On April 4, 2025, South Korea’s Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol in a unanimous decision.
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Symposium on South Korea’s Martial Law Declaration Part 1: Assessing the Ongoing Constitutional Crisis
—Dongeun Joh, Associate Professor, Seoul National University School of Law More than a month has passed since President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of emergency martial law was imposed upon the nation on December 3,2024. While the initial attempt to siege the National Assembly with the military was thwarted by a citizens’ blockade and the martial…
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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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Vietnam: Emergency Powers in Time of Pandemic and the Role of the Written Constitution
—Le Nguyen Duy Hau, Attorney at Law This blog post seeks to inform about a new constitutional development in Vietnam surrounding an enabling act formally vesting the Prime Minister (“PM”) with unprecedented emergency powers, and how such an event could provide meaningful suggestions in further research into Vietnam’s constitutional law.
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The Tatmadaw’s 1 February Actions are not an Emergency but a Coup
—Andrew Harding, Centre for Asian Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore In the early morning of 1 February 2021 the Myanmar military, the Tatmadaw, fulfilled what had been threatened for several days, by arresting the President and other leading civilian officials, and declaring an emergency and their taking over of the country.
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ICON Volume 18, Issue 2: Editorial
Orbán and the self-asphyxiation of democracy; Publishers, academics and the battles over copyright and your rights, Part I; Festschrift? ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow! That is the whole Torah; the rest is interpretation’ (from the Elder Hillel in Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a); In this issue Orbán and the…
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COVID-19 and the Bound Executive
—Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago, and Mila Versteeg, University of Virginia The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a wide variety of governmental responses as it makes its way around the globe, and scholars have been tracking them from many different angles. In a new paper, we argue that the pandemic response should modify our understanding about…
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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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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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How COVID-19 Unveils the True Autocrats: Viktor Orbán’s Ermächtigungsgesetz
—Gábor Halmai, European University Institute At a conference held at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in London on 20-21 May 1967, Isaiah Berlin used the term ‘false’ populism, defining it as “the employment of populist ideas for the ends other than those which the populist desired.