VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee

Since income tax is levied on a progressive basis (depending on the income of each taxpayer), how we define the taxpayer or “tax unit” is of critical importance. In the 1960 ruling of Commissioner of Income Tax v. Indira Balakrishna, the Supreme...

President Jair Bolsonaro’s government (2019-2022) brought unprecedented turmoil to the Brazilian democracy. In this paper, we argue that Bolsonaro’s government builds on and expands pre-existing zones of authoritarianism embedded in the country....

While India possesses features conventionally associated with liberal democracies, it has lately been understood to suffer from “democratic backsliding”. Commentators have used descriptions like “authoritarianism”, “electoral autocracy”,...

Since the 2000s, scholars have been faced with a new phenomenon, which political scientists eventually labelled democratic backsliding. Law has not been central in studies of democratic backsliding, but it has not been completely absent either. In...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the abuse of presidential and administrative powers with a view to weakening environmental protection. We argue that the concept of “environmental authoritarianism”, designating both a democratic...

The Trump administration directly attacked and indirectly subverted liberal democracy in many ways. This article describes several pivotal attacks and evaluates the efficacy of efforts to defend liberal democracy. It begins by analyzing how the...

With all key political institutions firmly in Orban’s hands, and with the electoral rules basically tilted to Orban’s advantage, many observers question whether Orban’s regime can be successfully challenged domestically, from within. As a...

South Africa embraced constitutional democracy in 1994 following the collapse of the Apartheid regime. The constitution that was finally passed in 1996 promised the development of a social democratic society. Within two decades, much of the promise...

The Chinese approach to law and development has been perceived in terms of experimentalism and resistance towards globally applicable development models. In recent years, however, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideologues and pro-establishment legal...

This paper analyses newly regulatory moves towards Foreign Direct Investment – FDI in Brazil. For that purpose, this paper explores the key economic rationale for regulating FDI and provides a legal baseline based on relevant FDI screening regimes...

On September 23, 2022, the UN Human Rights Committee (Committee) published its groundbreaking decision in Daniel Billy et al. v. Australia, in which it found that Australia’s failure to adequately protect indigenous islanders from the Torres...