Tag: Caribbean Constitutions
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Derek O’Brien – Comment On The Caribbean: Commonwealth Caribbean Elections.
When comparing the relative political stability of Britain’s former colonies in the Commonwealth Caribbean with the lack thereof in former British colonies in Africa and Asia and the former colonies of other major powers reference is sometimes made to Huffington’s ‘two-turnover test’(S Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, University of…
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Se-shauna Wheatle: Maurice Tomlinson v Television Jamaica Ltd: Horizontal Rights Application in Jamaica
For more than twenty years Jamaica was engaged in the process of amending the Chapter of Fundamental Rights enshrined in the Constitution of Jamaica 1962. The culmination of that project was the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (Constitutional Amendment) Act 2011, which ushered in substantial changes in the application of rights (including explicit provision…
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Derek O’Brien: CARICOM: ‘a new legal order’?
The recent case of Myrie v Barbados, in which the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) held that the actions of the Barbados immigration authorities in refusing entry to a Jamaican national violated the automatic right of entry granted to all CARICOM nationals pursuant to a Decision of the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM…
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Derek O’Brien: The Basic Structure Doctrine and the Courts of the Commonwealth Caribbean
The basic structure doctrine, as first expounded by the Indian Supreme Court in the early 1970s in Kesavanand Bharati v Kerala (A.I.R. 1973 SC 1461), asserts that the law-making powers of a legislature are not unlimited in as much as they do not extend to altering the ‘basic structure’ of the constitution. Some 40 years…
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Derek O’Brien and Se-shauna Wheatle: The Commonwealth Caribbean and the Uses and Abuses of Comparative Constitutional Law
The practice of judges engaging in a transnational judicial conversation about constitutional rights, by referring to the judgments of international human rights courts and other constitutional courts when interpreting their own domestic Bills of Rights, has been commented upon in detail by comparative constitutional law scholars, such as Christopher McCrudden and Anne-Marie Slaughter[1]. It still…