Lecture: Is the Court of Strasbourg a constitutional court? The Italian perspective

Prof. Dr. Diletta Tega

University of Bologna (Italy)

Date: 26.2.2025, 6:00 p.m.
Venue: Room L623, 6th floor | Faculty of Law | Sigmund Freud University | Lassallestraße 3, 1020 Vienna

 

As you may infer from its decisions, the Strasbourg Court perceives itself as a constitutional judge, albeit of a peculiar legal system. Even some literature supports this position. But is it really so? According to the constitutionalist view that I share, it is not. The purpose of this presentation is to highlight the different nature that is typical of constitutional courts and of the Strasbourg Court, by taking into consideration decisions that have affected the Italian legal system and that have seen the Strasbourg court at odds with the Constitutional court.

 

Please register until 25.2.2025: konrad.lachmayer@jus.sfu.ac.at

Biography

Diletta Tega (1973) is a full professor of Constitutional Law at the Department of Legal Studies of the Alma mater studiorum. She is, as of 2020, the first and, currently, only woman to hold one of the four chairs of Constitutional Law at the University of Bologna.

She is part of the Editorial Board of the journal Quaderni costituzionali. She is president of the Italian Chapter of the International Society of Public Law, ICON-S.

She clerked at the Italian Constitutional Court (2011–2014).

She served as the Italian legal junior expert (2007–2009) at the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

She has been a visiting professor at Antwerpen Law School; visiting fellow at the European University Institute (a.y. 2019–2020); Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for comparative public law and international law (a.y. 2016–2017); Emile Noël Research Fellow at the School of Law of New York University (a.y. 2009–2010).

She will be a Visiting Professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid in May 2025.

She is the author of more than 100 scholarly papers, including a chapter in the edited volume Le discriminazioni razziali ed etniche. Profili giuridici di tutela (FrancoAngeli, with the collaboration of the National Antidiscrimination Racial Office, 2012); her most recent book, La Corte nel contesto, published by Bononia University Press (2020), is a more organic reflection of the way in which the Constitutional Court operated in relation to the changes that the institutional context underwent. The volume has been reviewed on several occasions (in Sole24Ore Domenica and other Italian, international, and Spanish periodicals, among others), and its conclusions have been relaunched in both English-language essays (The Italian Constitutional Court in its context. A narrative, in European Constitutional Law Review, 2021) as well as Spanish ones (Tribunal Constitucional Italiano: un balance de su trayectoria y sus retos actuales, forthcoming in Teoría y Realidad Constitucional); her previous monographic work, I diritti in crisi, was published by Giuffrè (2012); most recently, she was the creator, coordinator and co-author of the handbook The Italian Constitutional Law in the European Context (Kluwer, 2023).

Rights are at the very center of her research, starting from the issues concerning their process of affirmation and their guarantee, both from an Italian perspective, as well as from a comparative, supra- and international one. A particular focus has also been placed on the principle of equality, through which it was possible to critically analyze the concept of political representation and the problem of gender under-representation in governing bodies. These studies and reflections culminated in the publication of essays and in the participation in specialized seminars. Finally, the topic of bioethics has been dealt with not only in scholarly circles, but also as a member of the bioethics committees of the Alma Mater University of Bologna and the Republic of San Marino.