Reply To: Article 1 should (not) link to external legal documents

[Giuseppe Martinico]

Post-totalitarian constitutions have always worked like this: they open themselves to international human rights treaties and thanks to these they manage to update the protection of fundamental rights without having to change the text all the time. To pretend to fix an exhaustive list of fundamental rights without referring to the human rights treaties or the Charter of fundamental rights would end up frustrating the need to guarantee a high standard of protection to the rights themselves because the text of the constitutions gets old if it is not linked to the evolution of the international community. The history of constitutional law is full of referrals like this, we need to produce a document that has the ambition to work.