公民社会经济权利宪法救济之中国路径——以南非宪法法院判例为切入点

南非宪法法院对公民社会经济权利的违宪审查判例受到宪法学界的广泛关注,这种做法具有制度创新和人权保障的双重效应。我们可以借鉴南非宪法法院相关判例,建立公民社会经济权利宪法救济的中国路径。在人民法院系统中设立宪法法庭,在人民代表大会系统中设立宪法委员会,并且在人民法院和人民代表大会之间建立特定的衔接机制,通过这些措施有助于实现中国特色的公民社会经济权利宪法救济。     

Horizontal Effect and the Constitutional Constraint

This article offers a new interpretation – the ‘constitutional constraint’ model – of the duty the Human Rights Act imposes on the courts to give horizontal effect to European Convention rights through the common law. The model requires courts to develop the common law compatibly with the Convention, but only where compatibility can be achieved by incremental development. We argue that models requiring more than incremental development are unsustainable; that deep constitutional norms compel the constraint of incrementalism, which is preserved under the HRA; and that by virtue of section 2 of the HRA, Convention rights function as principles rather than hard‐edged rights in this context. This further undermines the idea that the courts must strictly apply Convention rights and cannot allow them to be overridden by non‐Convention factors. The final section explores the nature of incrementalism in this context and the impact of the model on the doctrine of judicial precedent.     

State Courts, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Protection of Civil Liberties

Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state supreme courts to use the state constitutional grounds to preserve and increase the protections of the Bill of Rights. Using event count analysis, we examine state search-and-seizure cases for 1981 to 1993 to ascertain under what circumstances state courts would use this opportunity to eliminate Supreme Court review. We find that the relative ideological position of the state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court often prevents, or does away with the need for, liberal courts to use the adequate and independent state grounds doctrine to expand the rights of criminal defendants and that state supreme court justices react more predictably in the assertion of constitutional protection law than the general consensus suggests.     

All Bark and No Bite: Notes on the Federal Constitutional Court's 'Banana Decision'

The Federal Constitutional Court's banana decision of 7 June 2000 continues the complex theme of national fundamental‐rights control over Community law. Whereas in the ‘Solange II’ decision (BVerfGE 73, 339) the Federal Constitutional Court had lowered its standard of review to the general guarantee of the constitutionally mandatorily required minimum, the Maastricht judgment (BVerfGE 89, 155) had raised doubts as to the continued validity of this case law. In the banana decision, which was based on the submission of the EC banana market regulation by the Frankfurt‐am‐Main administrative court for constitutional review, the Federal Constitutional Court has now confirmed the ‘Solange II’decision and restrictively specified the admissibility conditions for constitutional review of Community law as follows. Constitutional complaints and judicial applications for review of European legislation alleging fundamental‐rights infringements are inadmissible unless they show that the development of European law including Court of Justice case law has since the ‘Solange II’ decision generally fallen below the mandatorily required fundamental‐rights standard of the Basic Law in a given field. This would require a comprehensive comparison of European and national fundamental‐rights protection. This paper criticises this formula as being logically problematic and scarcely compatible with the Basic Law. Starting from the position that national constitutional courts active even in European matters should be among the essential vertical ‘checks and balances’ in the European multi‐level system, a practical alternative to the Federal Constitutional Court's retreat is developed. This involves at the first stage a submission by the Federal Constitutional Court to the Court of Justice, something that in the banana case might have taken up questions on the method of fundamental‐rights review and the internal Community effect of WTO dispute settlement decisions. Should national constitutional identity not be upheld even by this, then at a second stage, as ultima ratio taking recourse to general international law, the call is made for the decision of constitutional conflicts by an independent mediating body.     

论法院对基本权利的保护

为公民基本权利提供保护,是现代国家合法性的重要来源。普通法院在基本权利保护中发挥着重要作用。德国虽然设立了宪法法院,但保护公民基本权利的职责仍主要由其他法院承担。在没有设立宪法法院的国家,通过普通法院更是为基本权利提供司法保护的唯一途径。我国法院应当通过三种方式为基本权利提供司法保护:如果法律有保护基本权利的具体规定,法院应当直接适用法律;如果法律对基本权利的保护只作了抽象规定,法院应当对有关抽象立法进行合宪解释之后予以适用;如果法律没有作出保护基本权利的任何规定,法院可以直接适用宪法的基本权利条款。     

'Solange, chapter 3': Constitutional Courts in Central Europe—Democracy—European Union

Abstract: Soon after the accession of eight post‐communist states from Central and Eastern Europe to the EU, the constitutional courts of some of these countries questioned the principle of supremacy of EU law over national constitutional systems, on the basis of their being the guardians of national standards of protection of human rights and of democratic principles. In doing so, they entered into the well‐known pattern of behaviour favoured by a number of constitutional courts of the ‘older Europe’, which is called a ‘Solange story’ for the purposes of this article. But this resistance is ridden with paradoxes, the most important of which is a democracy paradox: while accession to the EU was supposed to be the most stable guarantee for human rights and democracy in post‐communist states, how can the supremacy of EU law be now resisted on these very grounds? It is argued that the sources of these constitutional courts’ adherence to the ‘Solange’ pattern are primarily domestic, and that it is a way of strengthening their position vis‐à‐vis other national political actors, especially at a time when the role and independence of those courts face serious domestic challenges.     

Social Insurance Monopolies in Community Competition Law and the Italian Constitution: 'Practical' Convergences and 'Theoretical' Conflicts

An Italian judge, following earlier suggestions of the national antitrust Authority, has referred to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling under Article 234 EC Treaty two questions on the interpretation of Articles 81 and 86 of the EC Treaty. With those questions, raised in an action brought by a self‐employee against the Istituto Nazionale per l'Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro (INAIL) concerning the actor's refusal to pay for social insurance contributions, the Tribunale di Vicenza has in summary asked the Court of Justice whether the public entity concerned, managing a general scheme for the social insurance of accidents at work and professional diseases, can be qualified as an enterprise under Article 81 EC Treaty and, if so, whether its dominant position can be considered in contrast with EC competition rules. This article takes this preliminary reference as a starting point to consider in more general terms the complex constitutional issues raised by what Ge´rard Lyon‐Caen has evocatively called the progressive ‘infiltration’ of EC competition rules into the national systems of labour and social security law. The analysis is particularly focused on the significant risks of ‘constitutional collision’, between the ‘solidaristic’ principles enshrined in the Italian constitution and the fundamental market freedoms protected by the EC competition rules, which are implied by the questions raised in the preliminary reference. It considers first the evolution of ECJ case law—from Poucet and Pistre to Albany International BV—about the limits Member States have in granting exclusive rights to social security institutions under EC competition rules. It then considers specularly, from the Italian constitutional law perspective, the most recent case law of the Italian Constitutional Court on the same issues. The ‘contextual’ reading of the ECJ's and the Italian Constitutional Court's case law with specific regard to the case referred to by the Tribunale di Vicenza leads to the conclusion that there will probably be a ‘practical convergence’in casu between the ‘European’ and the ‘national’ approach. Following the arguments put forward by the Court of Justice in Albany, the INAIL should not be considered as an enterprise, in line also with a recent decision of the Italian Constitutional Court. And even when it was to be qualified as an enterprise, the INAIL should in any case be able to escape the ‘accuse’ of abuse of dominant position and be allowed to retain its exclusive rights, pursuant to Article 86 of the EC Treaty. This ‘practical convergence’in casu does not, however, remove the latent ‘theoretical conflict’ between the two approaches and the risk of ‘constitutional collision’ that it implies. A risk of a ‘conflict’ of that kind could be obviously detrimental for the European integration process. The Italian Constitutional Court claims for herself the control over the fundamental principles of the national constitutional order, assigning them the role of ‘counter‐limits’ to the supremacy of European law and to European integration. At the same time, and more generally, the pervasive spill over of the EC market and competition law virtually into every area of national regulation runs the risk of undermining the social and democratic values enshrined in the national labour law traditions without compensating the potential de‐regulatory effects through measures of positive integration at the supranational level. This also may contribute to undermine and threaten, in the long run, the (already weak) democratic legitimacy of the European integration process. The search for a more suitable and less elusive and unilateral balance between social rights and economic freedoms at the supranational level should therefore become one of the most relevant tasks of what Joseph Weiler has called the ‘European neo‐constitutionalism’. In this perspective, the article, always looking at the specific questions referred to the Court of Justice by the Tribunale di Vicenza, deals with the issue of the ‘rebalance’ between social rights and economic and market freedoms along three distinct but connected lines of reasoning. The first has to do with the need of a more open and respectful dialogue between the ECJ and the national constitutional courts. The second is linked to the ongoing discussion about the ‘constitutionalization’ of the fundamental social rights at the EC level. The third finally considers the same issues from the specific point of view of the division of competences between the European Community and the Member States in the area of social (protection) policies.     

Tolerance and Liberal Justice

Tolerance, the mere “putting up” with disapproved behaviour and practices, is often considered a too negative and passive engagement with difference in the liberal constitutional state. In response, liberal thinkers have either discarded tolerance, or assimilated it to the moral and legal precepts of liberal justice. In contradistinction to these approaches I argue that there is something distinctive and valuable about tolerance that should not be undermined by more ambitious, rights‐based models of social cooperation. I develop a conception of tolerance as a complementary principle and an interim value that is neither incompatible with, nor reducible to, rights‐based liberalism. Tolerance represents a particular, non‐communitarian expression of the general dictum that the liberal state, having released its citizens into liberty, rests on social presuppositions it cannot itself guarantee.     

MARRIAGE IN CANADA—EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION?*

On July 20, 2005, the Canadian Civil Marriage Act became law, extending equal access to civil marriage to same‐sex couples while respecting religious freedom. This article briefly traces the distinctive juridical factors that have contributed to the legislation: the constitutional comity or dialogue among Parliament, the courts and the people resulting from the constitutional entrenchment of a Charter of rights and freedoms; the growth of the substantive concept of equality in Canadian law; and the impact of the constitutional division of powers and the nature of Canadian federalism. Together, these factors contributed to a constructive debate centered on respect for diversity.     

From Rogers to Rivers: the rights of the mentally ill to refuse medication

Many individuals with mental illness wish to avoid psychotropic drugs, a type of treatment that may relieve their symptoms only at the risk of unpleasant, even permanent, side effects. In marked contrast to the widely-held view that most patients may refuse any treatment and that even patients with mental illness may reject other psychoactive interventions such as electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery, the courts and legislatures have been slow to recognize any right to refuse psychotropic drugs. This Article demonstrates that many of the justifications offered for forcing patients to take unwanted medications are inadequate and that unless treatment refusals are reviewed outside mental institutions, patients' rights will rarely receive appropriate deference. The author analyzes the federal and state litigation to determine whether the courts have fashioned meaningful relief for the mentally ill. The Article concludes that two recent United States Supreme Court decisions have made it impossible for the federal courts to provide adequate protection. By contrast, several state courts have responded to the needs and rights of patients with mental illness.     

Collective Litigation and the Constitutional Challenges to Decriminalizing Homosexuality in Singapore

This article examines collective legal mobilization through the courts, or collective litigation, in a non‐liberal regime. It analyses the emergence and development of collective litigation to challenge the constitutionality of section 377A of the Penal Code, the law that criminalizes same‐sex sexual conduct in Singapore. The analysis focuses on the relational dynamics of collective litigation and legal subjectivities of the social actors involved, highlighting how social positions and strategic interests shaped their interactions and decisions on litigation. While gay rights activists emphasized their movement's collective interests when choosing the appropriate case and lawyers, a movement outsider pursued individual interests on behalf of a client. Due to their divergent social positions and strategic interests, the two teams competed with each other as they initiated two separate constitutional challenges. Tension between the teams led to conflict with constituents of the gay rights movement and influenced their relational dynamics with other parties.     

Ambivalent Legal Mobilization: Perceptions of Justice and the Use of the Tutela in Colombia

This article explores the relationship between legal consciousness and legal mobilization in the context of constitutional rights in Colombia. Citizens report extremely low confidence in the state and the judiciary, yet hundreds of thousands of Colombians make constitutional rights claims through the acción de tutela procedure each year. Why does profound skepticism of the ability of the judiciary to provide justice and fair treatment seem to coexist with high levels of use of the legal system? How do perspectives on rights and the legal system relate to observed mobilization of the law? Drawing on 74 interviews and an original 310‐person survey, this article develops legal consciousness theory, identifying the specific beliefs that encourage or discourage individuals to turn to the courts to make claims to their rights. In the Colombian case, understandings of law and the state encourage the use of the tutela procedure, not due to the realizable promise of the state to protect rights or the majestic power of the law, but because the tutela is understood to be the only mechanism through which citizens can access their rights. In other words, citizens turn to the courts because there is no other alternative.     

Access to courts by vulnerable persons in relation to hydraulic fracturing in South Africa

Hydraulic fracturing is in a planning stage in South Africa. Notices have been issued regarding pending administrative decision concerning applications for exploration rights to explore for natural (shale) gas largely in the Karoo region. Concerns, which are similar to those expressed in other jurisdictions regarding the process are also being raised locally. These concerns are exacerbated considering that a significant part of the population of the Karoo have limited understanding of the issues associated with hydraulic fracturing. Many of them are also poor, which may hinder their effective access to justice. The aim of this article is to examine the constitutional provision pertaining to the right of access to courts in South Africa vis-à-vis a theoretical underpinning of the right with a view to determining whether or not the provision can effectively be applied to guarantee the access of poor and vulnerable persons to the courts in the event of any potential violation of their rights by hydraulic fracturing. Recommendations are made in the conclusion, to reinforce the ability of poor and vulnerable persons to enforce the right of access to courts in the event that hydraulic fracturing becomes a reality in South Africa.     

Employment law

This article attempts to trace the history of the award of ‘vindicatory’ damages under Commonwealth Caribbean constitutions, to determine, first, why the courts were hesitant to grant damages for breach of constitutional rights; second, the circumstances and the principles that informed the decision of the courts to accept that an award of damages was an acceptable form of redress under Commonwealth Caribbean constitutions; third, the manner in which these principles have evolved over the past decades in Commonwealth Caribbean human rights jurisprudence; and fourth, examine the principles that underlie the award of the recently‐coined, ‘vindicatory damages’ for infringements of the Constitution.     

Liberalism and Its Other: The Politics of Primitivism in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Law

Liberalism is widely regarded as a modern intellectual tradition that defends the rights and freedoms of autonomous individuals. Yet, in both colonial and postcolonial contexts, liberal theorists and lawmakers have struggled to defend the rights and freedoms of political subjects whom they regard as “primitive,” “backward,” or “indigenous.” Liberalism thus recurrently encounters its primitive other, a face‐off that gives rise to a peculiar set of dilemmas and contradictions for political theory and law. In what ways can postcolonial law rid itself of its colonial baggage? How can the ideal of universal liberal citizenship overcome paternalistic notions of protection? How might “primitive” subjects become full and equal citizens in postcolonial societies? To explore these dilemmas and contradictions, I study the intellectual trajectory of “primitivism” in India from the construction of so‐called tribal areas in the 1870s to legal debates and official reports on tribal rights in contemporary India. Through a close reading of these legal provisions for tribal peoples and places, I explore the continuing tension between the constitutional ideal of liberal citizenship and the disturbing reality of tribal subjecthood produced by colonial and postcolonial Indian states.     

A New Leviathan: Benefit Sanctions in the Twenty‐first Century

This article highlights the spectacular growth of benefit sanctions in the United Kingdom which, at their peak, exceeded the number of fines imposed in the criminal courts. It proposes a three‐fold typology of monetary sanctions – punitive judicial sanctions, exemplified by court fines, regulatory administrative sanctions, exemplified by parking penalties, and disciplinary administrative monetary sanctions, exemplified by benefit sanctions – and compares them in terms of their main aims, how they are imposed, whether the interests of those sanctioned are protected, their severity, the socio‐economic characteristics of offenders, the hardship caused, how proportionate they are, and whether they are compatible with justice. It argues that they are particularly problematic because their severity causes great and disproportionate hardship, and because, in addition to punishing offenders, they also attempt to discipline them by managing their behaviour, and concludes that, in the United Kingdom, they function as a key instrument for disciplining and managing the poor.     

The State of Freedom in Europe

The reaction to 11 September damaged the liberty of those living in Europe who found themselves targeted as suspect terrorists while seeming to do little to ensure the security of the wider community. More recently a second emergency, rooted this time in the financial and economic collapse of 2008 onwards, has caused a further unravelling of Europe's constitutional project, even threatening the gains of past generations of European idealists. In today's Europe universal liberty and security have no meaning for many even if their shape is retained in structures that in truth mock rather than deliver democracy and human rights. This article traces the origins of the crises that have afflicted so directly the breadth of liberty and human security in the Union, demonstrating their roots in ‘viruses’ that have been present from the start of the European movement but which have now spiralled out of control. The essay ends by asking what can be done to prevent the full decline of the region into a state of neo‐democratic/post‐democratic unfreedom, one in which capital unbound from democracy thrives at the expense of the people.     

How Dispute Resolution System Design Matters: An Organizational Analysis of Dispute Resolution Structures and Consumer Lemon Laws

This study demonstrates how the structure of dispute resolution shapes the extent to which managerial and business values influence the meaning and implementation of consumer protection law, and consequently, the extent to which repeat players are advantaged. My analysis draws from, links, and contributes to two literatures that examine the relationship between organizational governance structures and law: neo‐institutional studies of law and organizations and socio‐legal studies of repeat players' advantages in disputing. Specifically, I compare an instance where powerful state consumer protection laws are resolved in private dispute resolution forums funded by automobile manufacturers but operated by independent third‐party organizations (California) with one where consumer disputes are resolved in public alternative dispute resolution processes run and administered by the state (Vermont). Through in‐depth interviews and participant observation in the training programs that dispute resolution arbitrators undergo in each state, I show how different dispute resolution structures operating in California and Vermont give different meanings to substantially similar lemon laws. Although my data do not allow me to establish a causal relationship, they strongly suggest that the form of the dispute resolution structure, and how business and state actors construct the meaning of lemon laws through these structures, have critical implications for the effectiveness of consumer protection laws for consumers.     

BREXIT,democracy and the rule of law

This article employs the image of the antisyzygy, the yoking of opposites, as an analytical tool to understand the dynamic and unresolved tensions built into the very idea of the European Union. It describes the EU as a forming a supranational constitutional space which does not supersede nation states, but instead seeks to preserve their specific identities while promoting and protecting the fundamental values they are called upon to embody as liberal constitutional democracies. The article then critically examines constitutional developments in the UK subsequent to its decision to leave the European Union and suggests that, paradoxically, it may have been the European Union which held the post-War post-imperial United Kingdom together and, without it and outside it, we may anticipate the UK's imminent dissolution into its original constituent nations – Brexit leads inexorably to BreUK-up.     

Constitutional Directives: Morally‐Committed Political Constitutionalism

About 37 state constitutions around the world feature non‐justiciable thick moral commitments (‘constitutional directives’). These directives typically oblige the state to redistribute income and wealth, guarantee social minimums, or forge a religious or secular identity for the state. They have largely been ignored in a constitutional scholarship defined by its obsession with the legitimacy of judicial review and hostility to constitutionalising thick moral commitments other than basic rights. This article presents constitutional directives as obligatory telic norms, addressed primarily to the political state, which constitutionalise thick moral objectives. Their full realisation—through increasingly sophisticated mechanisms designed to ensure their political enforcement—is deferred to a future date. They are weakly contrajudicative in that these duties are not directly enforced by courts. Functionally, they help shape the discourse over a state's constitutional identity, and regulate its political and judicial organs. Properly understood, they are a key tool to realise a morally‐committed conception of political constitutionalism.