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The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany [1] (Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland) is the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. The West German Constitution was approved in Bonn on 8 May 1949 and came into effect on 23 May after having been approved by the occupying western Allies of World War II on 12 May.
The legal status of Germany concerns the question of the extinction, or otherwise continuation, of the German nation-state (i.e. the German Reich created in the 1871 unification) following the rise and downfall of Nazi Germany, and constitutional hiatus of the military occupation of Germany by the four Allied powers from 1945 to 1949.
These rights have constitutional status, binding each of the country's constitutional institutions. In the event that these rights are violated and a remedy is denied by other courts, the constitution provides for an appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) (Art. 93 Abs. I Nr. 4a GG).
The constitution guarantees all rights from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which itself is not legally binding), with the exception of an unlimited right for asylum. The ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights allows citizens to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights .
The current German constitution, adopted in 1949, protects Germany's federal nature in the so-called eternity clause. Since re-unification in 1990, the Federal Republic has consisted of sixteen states: the ten states of the Federal Republic before re-unification ("West Germany"), the five new states of the former East Germany, and Berlin.
While East-Germany was under a single-party system, there was only a brief period when the SPD governed West-Germany alone on a federal level as a minority party following the dissolution of its coalition with the FDP in 1982. [43] Otherwise, all governments in West- and post-reunification Germany have been coalitions between two or more parties.
The law of Germany (German: Recht Deutschlands), that being the modern German legal system (German: deutsches Rechtssystem), is a system of civil law which is founded on the principles laid out by the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, though many of the most important laws, for example most regulations of the civil code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, or BGB) were developed prior to ...
The 1949 Constitution of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) contained many passages that were directly copied from the 1919 constitution. [46] It was intended to be the constitution of a united Germany and was therefore a compromise between liberal-democratic and Marxist–Leninist ideologies.