What’s New in Comparative Public Law

–Rohan Alva, Jindal Global Law School

In this weekly feature, I-CONnect publishes a curated reading list of developments in comparative 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 comparative public law blogosphere.

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

Developments in Constitutional Courts

1. The Indian Supreme Court has rejected a constitutional challenge to the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, holding as constitutionally sound Parliament’s decision to prohibit the trial of any child below the age of eighteen in the adult criminal justice system, creating rather a separate track juvenile justice system.
2. A court in Turkey has handed down a decision which restrains the Turkish government from banning the use of Twitter.
3. The Ukrainian Constitutional Court has ruled that the determination of Crimea’s Supreme Council to secede from Ukraine was in violation of Ukraine’s Constitution, even as the Constitutional Court of Russia officially recognized the treaty entered into between Russia and Crimea to be consistent with the Constitution of Russia.
4. The Constitutional Court of Moldova has declared unconstitutional certain parts of Annex. 1 of the Tax Code’s Title 4.
5. The legal prohibition in accessing information regarding the drug composition in the “lethal injection” by individuals who have been sentenced to death has been ruled to be unconstitutional by the Oklahoma District Court, citing due process concerns. 

New Scholarship

1. Mtendeweka Mhango, Constitutional Eighteenth Amendment Bill: An Unnecessary Amendment to the South African Constitution? 35 Statute Law Review 19 (2014) (analyzing some of the shortcomings in the proposed Eighteenth Amendment to South Africa’s Constitution, which seeks to amend constitutional provisions relating to the National Prosecuting Authority)
2. Pratiksha Baxi, Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India (evaluating the difficulties that arise in redressing complaints of sexual assault in India and the role that state institutions can end up playing in side-lining the victim from the pursuit of justice)
3. Social Difference and Constitutionalism in Pan-Asia (Susan H. Williams ed.) (a collection of essays which utilize different modes of analysis to identify how constitutions in “Pan-Asia” interact with ethnic and religious variations, among others)
4. Philip Alston, Against a World Court for Human Rights, Ethics and International Affairs (forthcoming 2014) (critiquing the idea of establishing a World Court to judicially review actions which result in the violation of human rights and analyzing the nature of difficulties that the functioning of such a Court will face)
5. Rehan Abeyratne and Nilesh Sinha, Insular and Inconsistent: India’s Naz Foundation Judgment in Comparative Perspective, Yale Journal of International Law Online (forthcoming 2014) (critically evaluating the Indian Supreme Court’s rejection of comparative constitutional law in its same-sex rights decision)

In the News

1. Justice R.M. Lodha has been recommended for appointment as the next Chief Justice of India.
2. The General Assembly of the United Nations has resolved to declare as invalid Crimea’s efforts to secede from Ukraine, and has asked the global community ‘not to recognize any change in the status of Crimea…’.
3. The governor for the state of Indiana has assented to a law which permits the carrying of firearms on school premises.
4. Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the head of Egypt’s army has resigned in order to contest the forthcoming elections for choosing the nation’s President.
5. The Parliamentary Assembly of the European Council has cautioned Turkey that the prohibition imposed upon accessing “YouTube” must be withdrawn since it is incompatible with the European Court of Human Rights’ approach to free speech.

Elsewhere on Blogs

1. Melissa Crouch, Road to Constitutional Amendment in Myanmar Going Nowhere, East Asia Forum
2. Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou, The Effectiveness of the European Court of Human Rights in Cases of War, ECHR Blog
3. M.R. Madhavan, Empowering Parliamentarians, The PRS Blog
4. Simonetta Manfredi, What Has the European Union Ever Done for Women? Oxford Human Rights Hub
5. Joe Palazzolo, A Serious Challenge to the Affordable Care Act, But Not That One, Wall Street Journal Blog 

Calls for Papers

1. A call for papers has been issued by the Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law. Papers received by June 1 will be eligible for inclusion in the journal’s third volume.
2. The International Association of Labour Law Journals invites submissions for the Marco Biagi Award. Papers are due by April 30, 2014.
3. The Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Fachbereich Rechtswissenschaft and the University of Turin, Dipartimento di Management invite papers for the conference on “Participatory rights in the environmental decision making process and the implementation of the Aarhus Convention: a comparative perspective on the German and the Italian system” to be held at the University of Turin between July 3 and 5, 2014. Abstracts should be emailed to eva.j.lohse@fau.de, and margherita.poto@unito.it by April 15.
4. O.P. Jindal Global University invites papers for a conference on “Information Society: Challenges for India” to be held on June 7-8, 2014. Abstracts of papers are due by April 25.