Description
In 2014, the Norwegian Parliament marked the bicentennial of the Constitution by enacting a new chapter on human rights. The new rights were highly influenced by international human rights treaties, especially the European Convention of Human Rights, which was incorporated in Norwegian law in 1999. Tomas Midttun Tobiassen’s dissertation investigates the legal implications of this constitutional reform.
In this talk, Midttun Tobiassen will provide a brief overview of his project and delve into the question of how the new constitutional rights should be interpreted. The starting point is the results of a study of all chamber judgments by the Supreme Court invoking the new rights. The study reveals that the Supreme Court interprets the new rights in a manner that closely mirrors the European Court of Human Rights' interpretation of parallel rights. However, in some cases about the European Convention, the Supreme Court is not invoking the parallel constitutional rights. In the talk, Midttun Tobiassen will discuss the Court's reasoning for this methodological approach and its implications, inter alia trying to characterize the relationship between the international law rights and the constitutional rights, and explore the impact it has on the substance of the Norwegian Constitution.
A draft paper will be circulated soon.
For more information about the seminar, please contact Mahalet Tadesse.