Applications are open for our Summer Program 2021!
This summer program applies research-based knowledge and professional expertise to the actual contexts where constitutional democracies in Europe and beyond are facing unprecedented challenges to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, Parliaments as democratic institutions par excellence have been coping, on the one hand, with the problem of ensuring the continuity of their work in a time when social distancing is imperative by trying to adapt their technological infrastructures to online participation and voting of their members. On the other hand, they have find it difficult, especially where declarations of emergency and the state of exception have been issued, to control massive rule-making by the executives, severely affecting fundamental rights.
The program aims to explore the tension between democratic principles, constitutional values and management of the pandemic, given the problematic development of accountability procedures in such a context; the extent to which the rule of law has been endangered, new forms of technocratic dominance have emerged and the immediate and prospective long-term implications of the constitutional and political reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak on representative institutions. These are the challenges ahead at national level as well as at supranational level, as special attention will be paid to the European response to the pandemic, both in the framework of the European Union and of the Council of Europe.