Jane Suiter

The creation of both the Citizens’ Assembly and the previous Convention on the Constitution played a role in supporting various referendums for constitutional change, most notably marriage equality and abortion regulation, suggesting a degree of ‘systemization’ of deliberation in the Irish process of constitutional review.

Oran Doyle

Abortion was criminalised in Ireland by sections 58 and 59 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861. During the 1970s and early 1980s, a number of judicial dicta suggested that the Constitution implicitly protected the right to life of the unborn. In 1983, the people approved the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, inserting Article 40.3.3.

Erika Arban & Tom Gerald Daly

An Eye-Catching Experiment

On 25 May 2018 the Irish public voted in a referendum to repeal the eighth amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, which had accorded equal constitutional protection to the life of the mother and the unborn. Since the result, international attention has focused on the novel deliberative mechanism that led to the referendum being tabled: the Citizens’ Assembly, composed of 99 randomly selected citizens and chaired by a former Supreme Court judge.

Anupriya Dhonchak

Disparate impact as opposed to disparate treatment is a result of ‘unintentional’, ‘indirect’ or ‘negligent’ discrimination due to a facially neutral law that disproportionately impacts a protected group. Article 15 of the Indian Constitution prohibits discrimination based on sex inter alia other grounds. Legal feminists have argued for critical contextual engagement beyond the confines of rigid textualism to recognise women’s right against indirect sex discrimination under Article 15(1).

Anupriya Dhonchak

Over the last few months, Indian women have been speaking out about their experiences of sexual harassment and abuse more than ever before. But the #Metoo movement, perhaps sparked six years ago by the notorious case of a 23-year old student being gang raped by six men on a bus in Delhi, has thrown into stark relief the extremely phallocentric nature of our state and societal institutions.

Asanga Welikala

Editors’ Note: This text is a cross-post from Groundviews and was published on 11 November 2018. The original text can be viewed here.

There have been intense public debates over the meaning and interpretation of the Constitution, and especially the far-reaching changes introduced by the Nineteenth Amendment in 2015, since the dramatic and ongoing attempt at an unconstitutional transfer power that began on the evening of Friday 26th October.

Dinithi De Alwis

On the night of October 27th Sri Lanka became plagued by a constitutional crisis, when it was announced that President Maithripala Sirisena had removed Ranil Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister and sworn in former President Mahinda Rajapaksa as the new PM.

Since then, many exceptional scholars and lawyers have highlighted the fundamental unconstitutionality of President Sirisena’s actions. Ordinary citizens have taken to the streets to demand that their democracy, votes, and human rights be respected.

Surya Rajkumar

On the 24th of November 1948, the Indian Constituent Assembly debated the draft Article 38 which later found itself as Article 47 in the Indian Constitution. Today, Article 47 envisages a prohibition on the consumption of intoxicating drinks except for medicinal purposes. Article 47, although a Directive Principle, has been fodder to populist rhetoric in election times. But total prohibition has demonstrably failed in contemporary India.

Emilio Peluso Neder Meyer

The world observed Brazil during the past weeks in a state of astonishment. Newspapers from the most varied editorial lines seemed to not bore themselves with emulating the old adage “do not say I did not warn you”.

Arianna Vedaschi and Chiara Graziani

Before the outbreak of the terrorist threat in 2001, Blackstone’s claim that “every right when withheld must have a remedy, and every injury its proper redress” could be considered as a well-established certainty in democratic countries. Yet the practice of extraordinary renditions (ERs) shows that international terrorism puts even such an apparently self-evident principle under stress.