Abstract
Rainer Hofmann and I shared the enlightening experience of having written our ‘habilitation books’ under the supervision of Professor Rudolf Bernhardt, former Director of the Heidelberg Max-Planck Institute for International and Comparative Public Law and former President of the European Court of Human Rights, on the relevance of fundamental rights for designing foreign policies and international law and institutions. In constitutional democracies recognizing human and democratic rights as legal foundations of national Constitutions, the limited foreign policy powers delegated by the constituent people – and also international law – must be interpreted as being constitutionally limited by human rights. Hence, This contribution explains why human rights cannot protect the universally agreed sustainable development goals without being embedded into multilevel democratic constitutionalism protecting transnational rule-of-law, ‘constitutional politics’ and ‘constitutional economics’ for the benefit of citizens and their human and constitutional rights.
Prof. Dr. Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, European University Institute, Florence.
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Notes
- 1.
UN (2015) Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; the citations are from the Preamble of the Declaration (UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/70/1 adopted 25.09.2015).
- 2.
Petersmann (2022), chapters 1–5.
- 3.
Petersmann (2022), chapter 5. European HRL remains, however, imperfectly protected (e.g. vis-à-vis migrants and refugees seeking protection inside the EU) due to social opposition to truly ‘cosmopolitan law’.
- 4.
UNSC Res. 2532 (2020), pmbl. para. 11; UNSC Res. 2565 (2021), pmbl. 17.
- 5.
UNSC Res. 2532 (2020), pmbl. para. 2.
- 6.
Petersmann (2020).
- 7.
Petersmann (2012), p. 374 et seq.
- 8.
On behavioural economics exploring intuitive or irrational economic behaviour see, e.g.: van Aaken and Kurtz (2020), p. 601.
- 9.
- 10.
Cooter (2002), p. 127 et seq.
- 11.
On the EU’s ‘foreign policy constitution’ see Petersmann (2016), p. 449–469.
- 12.
On the illegal blocking and contradictory criticism by the United States of the WTO dispute settlement system see Petersmann (2022), chapter 3.
- 13.
Petersmann (2022), chapter 3; distinctions between ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘state-capitalism’, and ‘ordo-liberalism’ refer to policy trends that elude precise legal definitions. Even in the USA, government spending, budget deficits, central bank interventions, welfare payments and corporate bailouts have increased over the past decades.
References
Cooter RD (2002) The strategic constitution. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Petersmann E-U (2012) International economic law in the 21st century: constitutional pluralism and multilevel governance of interdependent public goods. Hart Publishing, Oxford
Petersmann E-U (2016) The EU’s cosmopolitan foreign policy constitution and its disregard in transatlantic free trade agreements. Eur Foreign Affairs Rev 21(4):449–469
Petersmann E-U (2020) Neo-liberal, state-capitalist and ordo-liberal conceptions of world trade: the rise and fall of the WTO dispute settlement system. China (Taiwan) Yearbook Int Law Affairs 38:1–41
Petersmann E-U (2022) Transforming world trade and investment law for sustainable development. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Van Aaken A, Kurtz J (2020) Beyond rational choice: international trade law and the behavioral political economy of protectionism. J Int Econ Law 22:601–628
Voigt S (2020) Constitutional economics: a primer. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
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Petersmann, E.U. (2023). Human Rights as Foundation of Transnational Constitutionalism? How to Respond to “Constitutional Implementation Deficits”. In: Donath, P.B., Heger, A., Malkmus, M., Bayrak, O. (eds) Der Schutz des Individuums durch das Recht. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66978-5_16
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