This book brings recent insights about sovereignty and citizen participation in the Belgian Constitution to scholars in the fields of law, philosophy, history, and politics. Throughout the Western world, there are increasing calls for greater citizen participation. Referendums, citizen councils, and other forms of direct democracy are considered necessary antidotes to a growing hostility towards traditional party politics. This book focuses on the Belgian debate, where the introduction of participatory politics has stalled because of an ambiguity in the Constitution. Scholars and judges generally claim that the Belgian Constitution gives ultimate power to the nation, which can only speak through representation in parliament. In light of this, direct democracy would be an unconstitutional power grab by the current generation of citizens. This book critically investigates this received interpretation of the Constitution and, by reaching back to the debates among Belgium's 1831 founding fathers, concludes that it is untenable. The spirit, if not the text, of the Belgian Constitution allows for more popular participation than present-day jurisprudence admits. This book is the first to make recent debates in this field accessible to international scholars. It provides a rare source of information on Belgium's 1831 Constitution, which was in its time seen as modern constitutionalism's greatest triumph and which became a model for countless other constitutions. Yet the questions it asks reverberate far beyond Belgium. Combining new insights from law, philosophy, history, and politics, this book is a showcase for continental constitutional theory. It will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers in constitutional law, political and legal philosophy, and legal history. Chapters 3, 4, 11, and 15 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/sovereignty-civic-participation-constitutional-law-brecht-deseure-raf-geenens-stefan-sottiaux/e/10.4324/9781003039525

This book brings recent insights about sovereignty and citizen participation in the Belgian Constitution to scholars in the fields of law, philosophy, history, and politics. Throughout the Western world, there are increasing calls for greater citizen participation. Referendums, citizen councils, and other forms of direct democracy are considered necessary antidotes to a growing hostility towards traditional party politics. This book focuses on the Belgian debate, where the introduction of participatory politics has stalled because of an ambiguity in the Constitution. Scholars and judges generally claim that the Belgian Constitution gives ultimate power to the nation, which can only speak through representation in parliament. In light of this, direct democracy would be an unconstitutional power grab by the current generation of citizens. This book critically investigates this received interpretation of the Constitution and, by reaching back to the debates among Belgium's 1831 founding fathers, concludes that it is untenable. The spirit, if not the text, of the Belgian Constitution allows for more popular participation than present-day jurisprudence admits. This book is the first to make recent debates in this field accessible to international scholars. It provides a rare source of information on Belgium's 1831 Constitution, which was in its time seen as modern constitutionalism's greatest triumph and which became a model for countless other constitutions. Yet the questions it asks reverberate far beyond Belgium. Combining new insights from law, philosophy, history, and politics, this book is a showcase for continental constitutional theory. It will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers in constitutional law, political and legal philosophy, and legal history. Chapters 3, 4, 11, and 15 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/sovereignty-civic-participation-constitutional-law-brecht-deseure-raf-geenens-stefan-sottiaux/e/10.4324/9781003039525

This collection reveals the Janus-faced character of federalism in the European Union. Federalism appears in two main forms in the EU. On the one hand, numerous formerly unitary Member States have embarked on a path towards a (quasi-)federal governance structure. On the other hand, the EU itself is sometimes qualified as a federal system. Significantly, the concept of federalism has a very different, even opposite, connotation in both contexts. When associated with Member State reform, federalism is regarded as a technique for accommodating autonomy claims of sub-state nations. By contrast, when federalism is used as a label for the EU itself, it is conceived as a far-reaching way of integrating the nations of Europe. This dual appearance of federalism in the EU context is central to the structure of the book. The focus of this book's first set of essays is on domestic federalization processes, more particularly on the impact of these processes on EU law and vice versa. In a second set of contributions, the attention shifts to the question as to whether the EU itself can be described as a federal system, and whether it can learn from existing federations. (Series: Modern Studies in European Law - Vol. 33)

Taking as a starting point the widely accepted view that states confronted with terrorism must find a proper equilibrium between their respective obligations of preserving fundamental rights and fighting terrorism effectively, this book seeks to demonstrate how the design and enforcement of a human rights instrument may influence the result of that exercise. An attempt is made to answer the question how a legal order's approach to the limitation of rights may shape decision-making trade-offs between the demands of liberty and the need to guarantee individual and collective security. In doing so, special attention is given to the difference between the adjudicative methods of balancing and categorisation. The book challenges the conventional wisdom that individual rights, in times of crisis, are better served by the application of categorical rather than flexible models of limitation. In addition, the work considers the impact of a variety of other factors, including the discrepancies in enforcing an international convention as opposed to a national constitution and the use of emergency provisions permitting derogations from human rights obligations in time of war or a public emergency. The research questions are addressed through a comparative study of the terrorism-related restrictions on five fundamental rights protected under the European Convention on Human Rights and the United States Constitution: the right to freedom of expression, the right to freedom of association, the right to personal liberty, the right to privacy, and the right to a fair trial. The book offers both a theoretical account of the paradoxical relationship between terrorism and human rights and a comprehensive comparative survey of the major decisions of the highest courts on both sides of the Atlantic.