Judicial oversight of amendments to the Federal Constitution

Abstract

The research dealt with the issue of oversight over the amendments to the federal constitution, without a doubt that the constitution is the basic structure in building the legal state and it defines the main principles in the state such as the form of the state, the system of government and the exercise of power, as well as the rights and freedoms of individuals, and since the constitution is a reflection of economic and social conditions The political and cultural conditions of societies and those circumstances and conditions are subject to continuous development and change, so this development must be kept up by amending the constitution. In federal countries whose constitution is characterized by stagnation, the process of amending the constitution is more complex in terms of procedures and mechanisms of amendment and the participation of the constituent units of federalism in it compared to the constitutions of simple countries. The process of monitoring amendments to the federal constitution is subject to a jurisprudential dispute, as one side of jurisprudence permits this oversight and the other side rejects it. With regard to the constitutions of states, we note that some constitutions permitted it and others prohibited it, in addition to the silence of some constitutions about organizing oversight over constitutional amendments, such as the federal constitution of Iraq of 1998. 2005, with regard to the scope of amending the constitution, we presented some conclusions that the amendment authority must take into account the constitutional and unconstitutional restrictions in the process of amending the constitution, especially the principles of supra-constitutionality, democracy, and justice even if the constitution does not provide for that, and to resolve the doctrinal dispute about the possibility of the constitutional judiciary by supervising the Constitutional Amendments We proposed to regulate the oversight of the constitutional amendments with an explicit text in the body of the constitution to grant oversight jurisdiction to the Federal Supreme Court in order to protect the formal and substantive integrity of the constitution.