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Constitutional CourtsNot all countries have a separate constitutional court. In some countries that do, only the constitutional court can deal with cases about the constitution. In other countries the constitutional court is the only court that can deal with questions about whether laws are constitutional. In some countries it is the specialised final appeal court for constitutional issues. In South Africa a constitutional court was created for the first time when the 1993 Interim Constitution was made: this was because many of the members of the judiciary under the old, racist, regime, were still in post and some were not entirely trusted to administer justice in the new constitution. So a new, high-powered, final court composed of people committed to the new regime was created. When the constitution of Afghanistan was being drafted, Professor Herman Schwartz, a leading authority on constitutional courts, wrote a paper on whether that country should have such a court. You can read that here on the website of New York University. Some more material will be available on this topic soon. But meanwhile you might be interested to look at the website of the South African Constitutional Court. This site has a list of many links to constitutional courts: http://www.concourt.am/catalog/ccourt.htm This site has resources materials on the comparative study of different constitutional courts in the world: http://www.concourts.net/comparison.php Another site with many links to constitutional courts is a Council of Europe site at: http://www.venice.coe.int/site/dynamics/N_court_links_ef.asp?L=E There is an Association of Constitutional Courts: Association de Cours Constitutionelles. This is not just for French speaking courts, though most of the material is in French | ||||||||||||||||
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