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constitution. When the German Constitution was made in 1949,
the current one, they put clauses in the constitution which were
made eternal of some of the basic principles. One of that is human
dignity which is Article 1 of the constitution and the others are
rule of law, democracy and so on. Those are the eternal principle
of law, which means that you cannot legally abolish them even by
constitutional amendment.

I think it was an achievement that was made after the
horrible lessons that we had to experienced or that Germany had
experienced with the time of national socialist. To come back to
rule of law, I think the German concept of that point of view now
is more comprehensive anyway. It has substantive elements, again,
more than under formalistic terms. We are not discussing many
topics under term rule of law, this is probably, we can also discuss
them under human right. We have a complete cut of human right
and many topics you could also put under the term rule of law
which can be discussed specifically under those terms, or even the
democracy. So that is why there is some limit discussions in the
scope. It is also interesting even in the civil law system.

The civil law system is based on statue and not on “judge
made law” and other developments. Our constitution in Article 20
prescribes, “The legislature shall be bound by the constitutional order,
4
the executive and the judiciary by law and justice” . So, there is more
than a statue law, in Germany the terminology is a little bit
different from that sense. Because in English it is called law, in
Germany it can either be law as a statue or law as a general
complete concept. So, sometimes, things got lost in translation
and misunderstanding probably are born. One example I want to
give for substantive understanding which was already born and
th
created in 19 century and until now worldwide success is that the
principle of proportionality. The principle of proportionality is
now mostly seen as a human right concept. In Germany, it was
used as the human right concept which actually born concept of
th
Rechtsstaat in the police law regulation in the 19 century.

4 Basic law of Germany, article 20 (3)

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