Amendments to the French constitution: One surprise after another

West European Politics

Volumn 22, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 76-91

  Carcassonne, Guy ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

NATIONAL PARK; NATIONAL POLITICS; POLITICAL CHANGE; POLITICAL SYSTEM;

FRANCE;

EID: 0033498738     PISSN: 01402382     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01402389908425334     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. This is an updated version of the article which first appeared in Revue du Droit Public 5/6 (1998) pp.1485-97. This version was translated from the French by Sally Marthaler.
2. An amendment reintroducing Articles 76 and 77 in a new form devoted to the future of New Caledonia.
3. An amendment which strengthened the independence of judicial authority by providing for the election of members of the Higher Council of Magistrates.
4. Following a decision of the Constitutional Council which, out of respect for the right of asylum, had revoked some of the clauses of a law on immigration, the Constitution was amended to allow these clauses to be readopted.
5. A new amendment relating to judicial authority was adopted in identical terms by both assemblies but the President of the Republic has not yet convened a Congress (a meeting of the two chambers) which must ratify it definitively. Moreover, an amendment extending to Polynesia a statute similar to the one already given to New Caledonia is to be examined shortly.
6. At the time of the 1995 amendment, decisions later imposed on the two assemblies were taken at a dinner attended by the majority leaders.
7. This amendment concerned the Communauté française, which no longer exists.
8. This amendment specified the dates for the opening of ordinary parliamentary sessions.
9. This amendment established the mechanisms to be applied if the course of the presidential election were disrupted by the withdrawal of one of the candidates.
10. Following the failure of the referendum which he had called, de Gaulle resigned from the presidency of the Republic in 1969.
11. This was the amendment introducing the election of the President of the Republic by direct universal suffrage.
12. The 'provisional twelfths' (les douzièmes provisoires) were monthly budgets which parliament passed every month since it had been impossible to pass the annual budget within the allotted time.
13. Diverses Dispositions d'Ordre Social are bills in which all sorts of measures are lumped together.
14. This revision gave 60 deputies or 60 senators, and thus in effect the opposition, the possibility of referring a law to the Constitutional Council whereas before this capacity had been reserved solely for the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and the Presidents of the Assembly.
15. The date of the first decision in which the Constitutional Council abolished in its entirety a law based on the Preamble to the Constitution.
16. The date on which the Constitutional Council declared itself incompetent to assess the validity of recourse to the referendum called by de Gaulle.