CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Degefie, Belachew Girma |
|---|---|
| Title | Constitutional Adjudication by Parliaments: Experiences across Time and Space |
| Summary | This thesis has the purpose of exploring historical experiences in France and Brazil and the contemporary constitutional set-up in China where parliaments were/are empowered to adjudicate constitutional issues and derive lessons for a similar contemporary constitutional design in Ethiopia. Comparison of the contexts and rationales under which legislative or non-legislative parliaments were/are endowed with the power of interpreting constitutions and failures/difficulties have been made. In France, the Revolutionaries, who were against the powerful courts of the pre-revolution period, excluded courts from interfering in the legislative and administrative functions for reasons of separation of powers and supremacy of la loi. The 1824 Brazilian Constitution had to establish strong emperor at the centre to safeguard unity of the country against powerful provinces. Regardless of the differences in context and rationales, parliaments in both France and Brazil had failed to adjudicate constitutional issues. Supremacy of the National People’s Congress and absence of separation of powers, both attributable to Socialist/Communist ideology, derived the current constitutional arrangement in China whereas in Ethiopia, the supremacy of the Nations, Nationalities and Peoples and consideration of the Constitution as an agreement among them has made the House of Federation to be constitutional adjudicator. The experiences across time in different jurisdictions indicate that (non-)legislative assemblies are not appropriate organs to adjudicate constitutional issues. Therefore, the Constitution of Ethiopia should take lessons of failure/difficulty from the experiences of France, Brazil and China and resort to other institutional choices for constitutional adjudication. |
| Supervisor | Moschel, Mathias |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/degefie_belachew.pdf |
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