The Portuguese Constitution of 1976: Half-life and decay

• Autores: Jónatas E. M. Machado
• Localización: Engineering Constitutional Change: A comparative perspective on Europe, Canada and the USA / Xenophon Contiades (ed. lit.), 2012, ISBN 978-0-415-52976-1, págs. 273-298
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Written constitutions of the constitutional-state type tend to consist of a bill of rights and a bill of powers against a background of substantive principles of human dignity, freedom and equality, fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law, and substantive and procedural justice. They also take into account the need to create protocols that articulate the local political community with larger projects of regional integration and cooperation within the international community as a whole. Speaking metaphorically, we may say that this is the typical “atomic nucleus” of the constitutional state. The Portuguese Republican Constitution (PRC) of 1976 lives up to these core requirements, although it has undergone a process of nuclear decay, generating different constitutional elements. After a short historical perspective, this chapter will address some aspects of these kinds of change and assess their impact on the nature of the PRC.