An Analysis of Changing the Constitution outside the Formal Constitutional Amendment Procedure

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Imam Sadiq University

2 Ph. D Student of Public Law, Imam Sadiq University

Abstract

Maintenance of the Constitution's supremacy demands its inflexibility and one of its requirement is to predict some difficult procedures for constitutional amendment so as to prevent the Constitution to be changed by personal discretion and tendencies and to preserve the strength of the political system. Hence, most of the constitutions predict a formal constitutional amendment mechanism and determine the method of its revision. But the question is to examine whether it is possible to change the Constitution in other ways other than the formal mechanisms or not; the issue in which this research seeks to answer with an analytic approach and by examination of case studies.
The findings of this research indicate that the legislative, executive and judicial officials intentionally and also as a practical necessity change the Constitution outside the formal amendment mechanisms in order to solve the dilemmas, and in some cases the Constitution is unintentionally changed because of their proceedings and in result, is infringed. In addition, referring to the self-determination right in determining the type and quality of the legal system is a pretext for total revision of the Constitution and therefore, making a new Constitution outside the aforesaid procedure.

Keywords


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