Comprehension

Direction for the questions:  Read the passage carefully and answer the given questions accordingly.

Every state has a constitution, since every state functions on the basis of certain rules and principles. It has often been asserted that the United States has a written constitution, but that the constitution of Great Britain is unwritten. This is true only in the sense that, in the United States, there is a formal document called the Constitution, whereas there is no such document in Great Britain. In fact, however, many parts of the British constitution exist in written form, whereas important aspects of the American constitution are wholly unwritten. The British constitution includes the Bill of Rights (1689), the Act of Settlement (1700-01), the Parliament Act of 1911, the successive Representation of the People Acts (which extended the suffrage), the statutes dealing with the structure of the courts, the various local government acts, and many others. These are not ordinary statutes, even though they are adopted in the ordinary legislative way, and they are not codified within the structure of single orderly document. On the other hand, such institutions in the United States as the presidential cabinet and the system of political parties, though not even mentioned in the written constitution, are most certainly of constitutional significance. The presence or absence of a formal written document makes a difference, of course, but only one of degree. A single-document constitution has such advantages as greater precision, simplicity, and consistency. In a newly developing state as Israel, on the other hand, the balance of advantage has been found to lie with an uncodified constitution evolving through the growth of custom and the medium of statutes. Experience suggests that some codified constitutions are much too detailed. An overlong constitution invites disputes and litigation is rarely read or understood by the ordinary citizen, and injects too much rigidity in cases in which flexibility is often preferable. Since a very long constitution says too many things on too many subjects, it must be amended often, and this makes it still longer. The United States Constitution of 7,000 words is a model of brevity, whereas many of that country’s state constitutions are much too long -- the longest being that of the state of Louisiana, whose constitution now has about 255,000 words. The very new, modern constitutions of the recently admitted states of Alaska and Hawaii and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico have, significantly, very concise constitutions ranging from 9,000 to 15,000 words. The 1949 constitution of India, with 395 articles, is the wordiest of all national constitutions. In contrast, some of the world’s new constitutions, such as those of Japan and Indonesia, are very short indeed.

Some constitutions are buttressed by powerful institutions such as an independent judiciary, whereas others, though committed to lofty principles, are not supported by governmental institutions endowed with the authority to defend these principles in concrete situations. Accordingly, many juristic writers distinguish between “normative” and “nominal” constitutions. A normative constitution is the one that not only has the status of supreme law but is also fully activated and effective; it is habitually obeyed in the actual life of the state. A nominal constitution may express high aspirations, but it does not, in fact, reflect the political realities of the state. Article 125 of the 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union and the article 87 of the 1954 constitution of the People’s Republic of China both purport to guarantee freedom of speech, but in those countries, even mild expressions of dissent are likely to be swiftly and sternly repressed. Where the written constitution is only nominal, behind the verbal facade will be found the real constitution containing the basic principles according to which power is exercised in actual fact. Thus in the Soviet Union, the rules of the Communist Party describing its organs and functioning are more truly the constitution of that country than are the grand phrases of the 1936 Stalin constitution. Every state, in short has a constitution, but in some, real constitution operates behind the facade of a nominal constitution.

CAT/1994

Question . 353

In countries with ‘normative’ constitutions