Constitutional rights

A constitutional right can be a prerogative or a duty, a power or a restraint of power, recognized and established by a sovereign state or union of states. All constitutional rights are expressly stipulated and written in a consolidated national constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, meaning that any other laws which are in contradiction with it are considered unconstitutional and thus regarded as invalid. Usually any constitution defines the structure, functions, powers, and limits of the national government and the individual freedoms, rights, and obligations which will be protected and enforced when needed by the national authorities.

Nowadays, most countries have a written constitution comprising similar or distinct constitutional rights. Since 1789, along with the Constitution of the United States of America (hereinafter U.S. Constitution), which is the oldest and shortest written constitution still in force, around 220 other similar constitutions were adopted around the world by independent states.

In the late 18th century, Thomas Jefferson predicted that a period of 20 years will be the optimal time for any Constitution to still be in force since "the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead." Coincidence or not, according to recent studies the average life expectancy of any new written constitution is around 19 years. However, a great number of constitutions do not exceed more than 10 years and around 10% do not last more than 1 year, as it was the case of the French Constitution from 1971 and not only.

The most common reasons for these continuous changes are the political desire of an immediate outcome and the scarcity of time devoted to the constitutional drafting process. A study from 2009 showed that the average time allocated for the drafting part of the process is around 16 months however there were also some extreme cases registered. For example, the Myanmar 2008 Constitution was secretly drafted for more than 17 years, whereas on the other extreme, like the case of the Japan's 1946 Constitution, the bureaucrats drafted everything in no more than a week.Nevertheless, the record for the shortest overall process of drafting, adoption and ratification of a national Constitution belongs to the Romania's 1938 Constitution which installed a royal dictatorship in less than a month. Studies on the matter showed as a general conclusion that usually non-democracies where the registered extreme cases where the constitution-making process either takes too long or is incredibly short. Important not to forget or make any confusions about it is that constitutional rights are not a specific characteristic of democratic countries, but also non-democratic countries have Constitutions, such as North Korea for example, which officially grants every citizen, among other rights, the freedom of expression.

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