The constitutional concept of personal dignity: how it is interpreted and reflected in the predominant models on continental Europe

Abstract

The european constitutional systems show two typical constitutional reception’s models of the dignity’s notion: the conversion into constitutional law by way of the Constitution and by way of the jurisprudence interpretation. The notion’s by direct way of the Constitution implicate the express recognition in the articles, what suppose its conversion in juridical norm immediate. So all the juridical order should be intérpreted in accordance with this principle. The dignity’s principle comply a very clear function in the objetive’s identification and the performance’s border of the successive governments in the task of the State’s management. The Grundgesetz of 1949, the spanish Constitution of 1978, the Constitution of Hungary of 1990 and the Constitution of Poland of 1997, are examples in this direction. The transformation in law by way of the jurisprudence interpretation suppose, however, the realization of a process of the concept’s assimilation, not across its inclusion in the Constitution’s articles, but, later, by way of assumption of the Constitutional Courts. The configuration of the dignity’s constitutional notion is then only the result of a deduction’s act of less trascendency, in which the juditial organ that determines the juridical value of the concept, doesn’t have really constituent value. These reception’s models are a valid interesting way of the juridical order concept’s incorporation and in some occasions it could be a firm base for a later conceptual constitutionalization. But till this don’t happened, the dignity’s concept hasn’t a constitutional level and can hide some times a certain weakness in the notion’s juridical consolidation.