Casenote –– Human Dignity as a Matter of Legislative Consistency in an Ideal World: The Fundamental Right to Guarantee a Subsistence Minimum in the German Federal Constitutional Court's Judgment of 9 February 2010

Author:

Bittner Claudia

Abstract

“Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect shall be the duty of all state authority.” It is with this proclamation in Article 1(1) Basic Law (“Grundgesetz” or “GG”) that the German Constitution starts its section on fundamental rights. When the Parliamentary Council formulated this basic right, they had in mind the denial of fundamental rights during the period of National Socialism and the atrocities of the Holocaust. The framers, however, did not envisage a constitutional right to state benefits despite Article 151(1) of the Weimar Imperial Constitution of 1919 linking the ordering of economic life with the purpose of ensuring a dignified existence for all. Utilizing a constitutional originalism approach the German Federal Constitutional Court (“FCC”) never could have arrived at what is referred to as the Hartz IV decision. This decision creates a constitutional right to guarantee by law a subsistence minimum based on Article 1(1) GG in conjunction with the social state principle in Article 20(1) GG. The decision can be read as—possibly the first—conceptualisation of a constitutional socio-economic right to statutory state benefits by a Constitutional Court.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Law

Reference99 articles.

1. For a very thorough presentation of the FCC's adjudication on human dignity in the English language see Henk Botha, Human Dignity in Comparative Perspective, 2 STELL. L. Rev. 171, 178–96 (2009).

2. See Aubel, supra note 7, at 278, 279.

3. See BVerfGK 5, 237 [official collection of the FCC's decisions at chamber level], 1 BvR 569/05 of 12 May 2005 (Ger.).

4. See Botha, supra note 1, at 189, 190.

5. For the concept of rights as trumps, see Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously XI (1977). See also Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle 198, 359 (1985).

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