Reply To: Fundamental rights and freedoms

[Fabrice Luijten]

Hi Olivia, Christer and others,

Interesting discussion. I do agree on the importance to explicitly emphasize the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms.

However I would like to make the link to another forum topic, started bij Jakub Jermar, that the preamble might also be seen as being to verbose and ideological. So this brings me to the question: ‘how do we decide what values are so universally important that they should have their place in the preamble? and what should we leave to the political realm or to society itself to organize?’ I think one of the criteria is timelessness, so I am a bit hesitant to inscribe things into the preamble / constitution based on the trends we see now in our society. Which does not mean that I don’t regard the protection of fundamental rights and freedom as ‘timeless’, because I do.

The discussion here and the one started by Jakub Jermar only makes me curious to your ideas on where to draw the line as to what makes it into the preamble. Is there some set of criteria available that can help us to decide? Hopefully one of the participants has some valuable insights on this matter.