Concurring Visions: Human Dignity in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the principles underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, if not the most fundamental one, is the concept of human dignity, shared as a common value by western democracies. During the 20th century, it has become a concept of international and domestic law. In this paper, some of the many questions arising out of the concept of human dignity will be addressed by tracing the approach to human dignity taken in the Charter jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada and of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht. To facilitate the conceptualization of human dignity it is defined in the constitutional context, its legal nature is examined, as well as its purpose and function within our constitutional framework. An analysis of the personal and substantive scope of human dignity follows. It will be shown that human dignity is a complex and multi-facetted concept of both Canadian and German constitutional law. In other words, human dignity is a highly abstract concept generating differences in opinion in all but the clearest cases when applied to the concrete situation of a constitutional dispute. It is apparent that the differences between the Canadian and German views are closely linked to the textual basis of human dignity in the written constitution - or absence thereof. In light of the prominent position of the human dignity guarantee in Art. 1(1) of the Basic Law it was easy to construe human dignity not just as a fundamental value, but as the core value of the constitutional value system, as a binding objective principle of constitutional law and as an individual right. Lacking a similar textual inducement, the Canadian approach is much more reserved. In essence, human dignity is a fundamental value exerting its influence indirectly, specifically on the interpretation of the fundamental rights and freedoms in the Charter. In summary, human dignity is an indispensable compass in our continuing journey to promote and protect the rights and freedoms of the individual. We may not always know where it will take us, but the fundamental value of human dignity will always remind us where we are coming from.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".