On 5/19/08, Murali K Warier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > complete belief in constitution and imagination of a flawless execution > of it have nothing to do with the rights of the people. > > You are again confusing my arguments. I am not imagining a flawless > execution of the Constitution. I rather have a belief in Constitutional law > and methods. When somebody makes a *statement that 'the counter terrorism > is for terrorizing people'* or demand unaccountable committees to oversee > judicial matters, one is expressing skepticism of that principle itself. > > It would be instructive to look at what Dr B R Ambedkar, the architect of > the Constitution has to say about using unconstitutional methods: > > *If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, > what must we do? The first thing in my judgement we must do is to hold fast > to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives. > It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution. It means that we > must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and > satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for > achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of > justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods > are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. > These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are > abandoned, the better for us. [Archives of the Parliament of > India<http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/vol11p11.htm> > ]* > > You may disagree with some part of it, but it is an *affirmation of the > belief in the Constitutional and the rule of law.*
The history is replete with incidents when the constutitonal rule of law were contarvened for power aggrandizement: These were termed as *state of exception*. To quote Agamben: *The history of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution is so tightly woven into the history of Germany between the wars that it is impossible to understand Hitler's rise to power without first analyzing the uses and abuses of this article in the years between 1919 and 1933. Its immediate precedent was Article 68 of the Bismarckian Constitution, which, in cases where "public security was threatened in the territory of the Reich," granted the emperor the power to declare a part of the Reich to be in a state of war (Kriegszustand), whose conditions and limitations followed those set forth in the Prussian law of June 4, 1851, concerning the state of siege*. Amid the disorder and rioting that followed the end of the war, the deputies of the National Assembly that was to vote on the new constitution (assisted by jurists among whom the name of Hugo Preuss stands out) included an article that granted the president of the Reich extremely broad emergency [*eccezionali*] powers. *The text of Article 48 reads, "If security and public order are seriously [erheblich] disturbed or threatened in the German Reich, the president of the Reich may take the measures necessary to reestablish security and public order, with the help of the armed forces if required. To this end he may wholly or partially suspend the fundamental*rights [ *Grundrechte*] established in Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153." The article added that a law would specify in detail the conditions and limitations under which this presidential power was to be exercised. Since that law was never passed, the president's emergency [*eccezionali*] powers remained so indeterminate that not only did theorists regularly use the phrase "presidential dictatorship" in reference to Article 48, but in 1925 Schmitt could write that "no constitution on earth had so easily legalized a coup d'état as did the Weimar Constitution." ............................... President Bush's decision to refer to himself constantly as the "Commander in Chief of the Army" after September 11, 2001, must be considered in the context of* this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception,* then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible. on agamben's *state of excpetion*: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben#State_of_Exception_.282005.29 take care, damodar prasad Best regards, > Murali > > On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 11:34 PM, salimtk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> when the constitution is found insufficient to accomodate the new claims >> of the unrecognized sections of people for their rights and spaces, it is >> forced to be amended. penal codes have to revoked to recognize the existence >> of third sex. >> >> > > -- > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't > want to hear. > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to greenyouth@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
