Foundation Workshop with Members of the Constitutional Court of Jordan on Constitutional Adjudication and Protection of Fundamental Rights

Members of the Constitutional Court of Jordan and Foundation experts discussed methods of constitutional adjudication in the context of protecting fundamental rights

The workshop was delivered via online video conferencing with experts from the Max Planck Foundation in Heidelberg and Members of the Court from Amman, Jordan.

Mr Hisham Al-Tal, President of the Constitutional Court inaugurated the workshop alongside Dr Mark Erbel, First-Political Officer at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Jordan and the Head of the Jordan Project at the Foundation. Following the official opening, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the Foundation’s Head of Project and Managing Director, Dr Kathrin Maria Scherr, and the Secretary-General of the Constitutional Court of Jordan.

The technical content on the substantive topics was delivered by the Foundation research fellows who then led a series of discussions that covered lawful and unlawful restrictions on fundamental rights, the inviolability of the core essence of the right and techniques for balancing conflicting rights. The key principles on the identification of fundamental rights, conflicts, limits to restriction of rights, necessity and proportionality were discussed in the light of Jordanian and comparative constitutional practice. Judge Nu’man al-Khateeb also presented on the conflict between individual rights and public interest in Jordanian Constitutional jurisprudence on behalf of the Constitutional Court of Jordan. Presentations were followed by lively discussions with the participants.

The specific component with the Constitutional Court of Jordan aims to build the capacity of Members of the Court on constitutional adjudication and was the first in a series of activities with the Constitutional Court of Jordan under the new Foundation project, “Strengthening Legislative Compliance and Constitutional Interpretation in Jordan”, generously supported by the German Federal Foreign Office.