Journal of Constitutional Law (Dec 2022)
One Goal of Transforming the Idea of a Treaty between the State of Georgia and the Orthodox Church of Georgia into a “Constitutional Agreement”
Abstract
In 2001, a new legal institution that appeared in the legislation of Georgia - the “Constitutional Agreement of Georgia” received significant criticism both at the national level and from competent international institutions. One of the main targets of these critical evaluations was the "constitutional" status assigned to it. Within the framework of this article, the author offers his own observations about one goal of transforming the idea of an “treaty between the state of Georgia and the Orthodox Church of Georgia” into a "Constitutional Agreement”. The structure of the article is as follows. The first introductory chapter briefly describes the chronology of the transformation of the idea of an “treaty” into a “Constitutional Agreement” (1994-2001) and, by referring to various landmark legal acts (drafts) or documents, offers essential guidelines for the central discussion. The second chapter presents the formal arguments supporting the idea of assigning a “constitutional” status to the agreement between the state and the church and their critical analysis, which frees up the necessary space for the author's theory. In the third chapter, with appropriate sources, the central thesis of the present article is substantiated, according to which one of the goals (actual result) of granting the “constitutional” status to the agreement between the state and the church was to avoid the exclusive legislative power of the state for this legal act and the corresponding relationship. In the final part of the article, all presented facts and developed reasoning are systematically summarized. It should be noted that the article was prepared within the framework of the current research, which aims to study the legal dimension of the Constitutional Agreement between the State of Georgia and the Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Georgia. Sources found and processed at this stage of the said research were used directly for this article. Accordingly, the author assumes that it may not fully indicate all sources, including those documents that the author did not consider appropriate for the discussion developed here, and those that have not yet been searched and processed. Nevertheless, the author believes that the presented sources are essentially sufficient to support the issue raised within the scope of this article and its supporting arguments.
