The Max Planck Foundation conducts seminar on cooperation and cohabitation between Supreme Courts and the Constitutional Court
The Max Planck Foundation conducted a high-level one-day seminar in December 2016, with ten existing Members and four new Members who were appointed to the Constitutional Court of Jordan in October 2016.
The delegation from the Max Planck Foundation delivered an update on roundtables held with members of the Constitutional Court and the Court of Cassation on the system of filtering cases which challenge the constitutionality of laws, its efficiency, standards of applicability and assessment at each stage and the efficacy of such a system in light of ease of access to, and efficient delivery of, constitutional justice. Under the current system, a case challenging the constitutionality of laws and regulations must first be raised in a pending case and then must be referred by ordinary courts to the Court of Cassation, and then onto the Constitutional Court.
The new Members appointed to the Court were also introduced to the longstanding fruitful cooperation with the Max Planck Foundation in providing technical expertise to the Constitutional Court of Jordan, as well as to judicial institutions, judges of the Cassation, Appeals and Administrative Courts, in-house legal advisors of the justice institutions and to lawyers on various aspects of comparative constitutional court practice, constitutional law and international law.
The seminar was one component of a larger project entitled ‘Strengthening the Constitutional System of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: Enhancing the Capacities of the Constitutional Court, the Court of Cassation and the Jordanian Bar Association’. The project began in April 2016 and will continue until September 2017. The entire project is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office and implemented with the support of the German Embassy in Jordan.