VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee

Courts can play a critical role in protecting the democratic participation of opposition parties. In this article, we examine the role of apex courts in South Africa and Zimbabwe as forums for democratic contestation by opposition parties....

This article categorizes Pakistan as a hybrid regime, as opposed to one operating under deep state, by tracing the roots of military dominance to the colonial Martial Race Theory. In this context, the article dissects who constitutes as political...

Fourth-branch accountability can be characterized as a constitutional trust-type mandate to provide intrastate nonpartisan accountability with a broad repertoire of institutional capacities. Fourth-branch institutions play a significant role in...

The scholarship on the role of opposition in parliaments has highlighted a dual role for the opposition, that is to extract accountability from the government and to be prepared as the “government-in-waiting”. However, there are significant...

Parliamentary opposition in Morocco has long been fragmented and confined. However, the Moroccan Constitution of 2011 solemnly enshrines the status of the parliamentary opposition, demonstrating the sincerity of its recognition. This enshrinement,...

When courts are faced with claims for unenumerated constitutional rights, it is very common for them to state that the separation of powers requires them to stay away from recognising such rights. I scrutinise the validity of this argument through a...

The dissolution of Parliament is one of the most important prerogatives of the Executive in Parliamentary and Semi-Presidential Systems. Nevertheless, most comparative legal systems have long regarded the use of such a prerogative as a...

This article addresses land legal conflicts in Brazil arising from the overlapping of protected areas with traditionally occupied territories. This legal practice is inspired by the American and European environmental protection models, which...

Scholars and judges have disagreed on an appropriate judicial definition of religion. Notably, scholarship has argued that definitions of religion are either underinclusive or over-inclusive. While this line of scholarship has achieved a significant...

Research reveals that more women than men are victims of marital or spousal rape, a persistent issue in many African marriages due to the archaic belief that wives are the property of their husbands. This belief is rooted in the idea, that upon...

Post-colonial legal theory has tended to focus on the binary of the Global North and the Global South, but it may also be helpful to understand constitutional development and “democratic backsliding” in Eastern Europe. This is shown by William...

Despite the formal end of colonial rule in Africa, (neo-)colonial structures continue shaping parts of the continent. Against this situation, the concept of an African Renaissance envisions the rebirth of the continent and its rise from oppression....

With the establishment of the military regime in Brazil in April 1964, the military achieved its long-standing objective of exerting lasting influence as a key political actor. Despite its commitment to “restore the rule of law” and fortify...

The 1988 Constitution promoted the expansion of social policy in Brazil, but other constitutional rules on fiscal policy limited the sources and funding of social spending. This paper discusses how the original text of the Constitution and its...

This paper examines how democratic institutions respond to disinformation when it is weaponized by elected officials for illiberal purposes. It focuses on the role of courts in countering disinformation in Brazil from 2018 to 2022, when the country...

This article explores the varieties of law and memory in Brazil and Germany, aiming to understand how and to what extent each country juridified their past. In doing so, we strive to understand this phenomenon from a contemporary perspective and...

The concept of an “open society of constitutional interpreters”, originally formulated by Peter Häberle, is one of the most overused clichés in Brazilian constitutionalism. In this paper, drawing on (i) criticisms formulated against Häberle's...

Constitutional objectives are often general and vague. They constitute future-oriented norms that usually have a high political content and are binding on all branches of the state, despite not providing exhaustive clarifications about who is to...