Hi, I see the US as having strayed greatly in practice from the US Constitution and Bill of Rights in many significant ways.
I’d like to know which other nations today actually function as if they had the US Constitution as their constitution whilst adhering to it.
This might be more of an opinion-oriented because gathering the facts on this would take a long long time.
Which parts? I don’t think that any other nation has the US’s combination of free speech and guns, for instance, but plenty have one or the other. So which of those makes you closer to the US?
In what way do you think the US is no longer following its own Constitution and Bill of Rights?
Why would you expect any nation (other than the US, obviously) to follow the US Constitution, or specifically the Bill of Rights? They have their own constitutions and human rights instruments; they’re going to observe those rather than a foreign country’s.
Needs more details. The US Constitution (as amended, including BOR) deals with:
So yes, OP, what are your parameters for whether some other country’s Rule of Law is or isn’t like that in the USA, or that the USA’s is strayed from what it should have been?
Let’s move this to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I don’t know why you would think this might be true anywhere. Please explain.
The conclusion that the U.S. has strayed from the constitution is a political and ideological belief. We can’t tell you what countries adhere to your ideological view of the constitution unless you tell what that is.
There are any number of western democracies that are have more freedoms than Americans in some fields and less than Americans in others. I’m sure all of them have constitution-like documents of some kind spelling out how their countries are governed and what the limitations of those governments are.
If you want an example of a country that was a democracy once but has slid dramatically into authoritarianism and/or chaos… Thailand, maybe? We need some parameters.
I can’t think of any. None of the European countries have comparable protections on speech, guns, or religion. Many European nations don’t practice jury trials, either.
Basically, if you’re not happy with the US, you’re going to be less happy elsewhere.
It’s easy to find an exception to every one of the ten amendments. For example, an accused has no sixth amendment right to be confronted by his accuser if the accuser is a child in a sex crime prosecution… Citizens have no right to peaceably assemble if the local police have cordoned off “protest zones”. In fact, on a recent flight back to the US, the flight attendant reminded passengers that they may not form into a group of more than three in any part of the plane during the flight according to US law – not even to wait in line to use the toilet. I’ve bailed people out of jail, who were arrested for standing still and quietly on a public sidewalk alongside the route of a presidential motorcade. Speedy trials were rather liberally defined at Guantanamo. Defendants re regularly sentenced to time served, owing to a glaring lack of a speedy trial, the defendant being presumed innocent during the time served.
Most European countries have constitutions that evolved from some charter that has been in place for many centuries. But most of the republics that were formed after the end of the colonial era in the mid 20th century, as well as those of Latin America, have constitutions that fairly closely reflect that of the USA. English versions of quite a few of them can be read on line.
Many are rather surprising in that they go further than the USA in certain freedoms. For example, Mexico’s established religion clause prohibits any church from owning any property or controlling or conducting schools.
This cuts both ways. For example, some European countries will abort a trial due to levels of adverse or prejudicial press coverage that would be permitted in the US. Is this weaker protection of free speech, or stronger protection of the presumption of innocence/the right to due process? Or maybe both? And European countries might be seen as providing a less vigorous vindication of the right to keep and bear arms that the US does, but more effective protection of the right to life and the right to bodily integrity. Similarly, there are rights in the US which are well-protected if you’re a citizen but less well-protected if you’re not, where another jurisdiction might afford a uniform level of protection to all. Whether you experience this as better or worse protection of your human rights will depend on your citizenship status.
Basically, the protection of human rights involves a good deal of negotiating tensions between competing claims about rights, and different countries will resolve these tensions in different ways. The OP is essentially asking for a country that resolves these tensions in the way that he thinks the US would to resolve them, if the US were true to his understanding and interpretation of the US Bill of Rights. But, as Acsenray points out, if he won’t tell us what his understanding and interpretation of the Bill of Rights is, it’s impossible to answer his question.
Well Liberia did model it’s original constitution closely on the US one and indeed tried to model their whole system of government on the US. However since it was ruled by a series of dictators for much of it’s history, the constitution didn’t really mean much.
What?
This is not at all true.
We’re still flailing here because the OP posed a confusing question and has not yet returned to clarify. I can buy that the U.S. is somewhat unusual in that it’s constitutional evolution was fairly quick (Revolution - 1774, Ratification - 1789, with an intervening experimental “Articles of Confederation” period) but even then they were building from centuries of English law. Former British Empire countries also had this advantage. Various European nations have transitioned from monarchies to parliamentary systems (sometimes retaining ceremonial monarchies), and of course the matters have been at times forced by warfare…
Anyway, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the current list of “liberal democracies” consists of:
[ul][li]the European Union (28 members)[]Norway[]Switzerland[]Japan[]Argentina[]Brazil[]Chile[]South Korea []Taiwan []the United States []India []Canada []Mexico []Israel []South Africa []Australia []New Zealand[/ul][/li]
How many of these have constitutions as the OP would define it?
How many of these specifically have constitutions based on the U.S. Constitution?
How many of these countries routinely and frequently violate their own legal/constitutional principles?
Which of these countries is the most “free” ?
What the OP’s point?
Is there any point in keeping this thread open? It’s got an unfathomable premise and the OP has not come back to clarify it, so I wonder what there is to debate?
The OP posted at 8PM so maybe is shift working and will be back tonight. Which would be great, this OP is just weird
With the assumption that OP will be back to participate:
Ahh, see, that’s odd, because I haven’t noticed this at all. Let alone “in many significant ways”. Perhaps you have an example or many?
What I suspect is that the OP has some conservative or right wing idea of what the constitution should mean and he thinks it’s self-evident that we have “strayed” from a proper understanding of the constitution. He didn’t think it necessary to explain because, I surmise, he thinks the “proper” meaning if the constitution should be self-evident to us as well.
That’s my guess.