International Human Rights Treaties in the People's Republic of China Constitutional Order

Abstract

At the beginning in the 1970s, amount of emerging liberal democracies shaped the domestic constitutional order by placing international human rights treaties into the domestic constitutions. In the 1990s, the constitutional incorporation of international human rights treaties spreads in or outside the Europe, e.g. Bosnia and Herzegovina and South Africa, with the characteristics of direct applicability of international human rights norms and super-legislative status in the constitutional system. The openness to the international human rights treaties is a common constitutional identity amongst Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Macao Special Administrative Region as well as Taiwan. The communist ideology deeply influences the Chinese constitution-making modality and the relationship between national and international law. The international law-making process was criticized to have been completely manipulated by the Western Capitalist states. The self-empowered Judicial Interpretation may assume an imagined mechanism of which the international treaties could be applied.