From the wires, a very interesting decision from the High Court of Justice in Israel, ruling that the privatisation of prisons "severely violate[s] the prisoners' basic human rights to dignity and freedom".
As far as I can see, the English version of the decision is not yet available on the Court's website, but there is a useful synposis and analysis on Yale's Comparative Administrative Law blog:
> CompAdminLaw: "Prison Privatization Judged Unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Israel"
25 November 2009
13 November 2009
TID-BIT: Parliamentary Due Process
I'm presently attending ANU's Public Law Week-end entitled "Change":
http://law.anu.edu.au/CIPL/Conferences&SawerLecture/2009/2009_PLW_Program_Registration.pdf
It's always interesting to catch up on developments abroad and to see how other jurisdictions deal with common constitutional and administrative law problems.
In the keynote Geoffrey Sawer Lecture delivered by Professor Hugh Corder from the University of Cape Town (http://law.anu.edu.au/CIPL/Conferences&SawerLecture/2009/Sawer_Lecture09.pdf), there was an interesting discussion of a South African case from their Constitutional Court touching on parliamentary due process:
Doctors for Life International v Speaker of the National Assembly and Others (CCT12/05) [2006] ZACC 11 (http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2006/11.html)
In short. There's a provision in the constitution that one of the houses of Parliament, the National Council of Provinces, must be ensure that there is adequate public deliberation on Bills that it is considering. In relation to some abortion reform legislation, the public hearings were patchy and inadequate. As a result the Constitutional Court declared the legislation unconstitutional and invalidated it (on a deferred basis). It's a touch more complex than that, but you get the basic gist!
An interesting contrast, I think, to New Zealand's frenzy of unbridled urgency and its deleterious effect on public participation and engagement in the law-making. The litigation does have its foundation in South Africa's very comprehensive constitution though. Personally, I'm not convinced about the courts having power like this to intervene in the parliamentary process - I'd prefer that Parliament itself took more responsibility to ensure process deliberative democracy. But food for thought at least.
http://law.anu.edu.au/CIPL/Conferences&SawerLecture/2009/2009_PLW_Program_Registration.pdf
It's always interesting to catch up on developments abroad and to see how other jurisdictions deal with common constitutional and administrative law problems.
In the keynote Geoffrey Sawer Lecture delivered by Professor Hugh Corder from the University of Cape Town (http://law.anu.edu.au/CIPL/Conferences&SawerLecture/2009/Sawer_Lecture09.pdf), there was an interesting discussion of a South African case from their Constitutional Court touching on parliamentary due process:
Doctors for Life International v Speaker of the National Assembly and Others (CCT12/05) [2006] ZACC 11 (http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2006/11.html)
In short. There's a provision in the constitution that one of the houses of Parliament, the National Council of Provinces, must be ensure that there is adequate public deliberation on Bills that it is considering. In relation to some abortion reform legislation, the public hearings were patchy and inadequate. As a result the Constitutional Court declared the legislation unconstitutional and invalidated it (on a deferred basis). It's a touch more complex than that, but you get the basic gist!
An interesting contrast, I think, to New Zealand's frenzy of unbridled urgency and its deleterious effect on public participation and engagement in the law-making. The litigation does have its foundation in South Africa's very comprehensive constitution though. Personally, I'm not convinced about the courts having power like this to intervene in the parliamentary process - I'd prefer that Parliament itself took more responsibility to ensure process deliberative democracy. But food for thought at least.
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