Although Belgian federated entities do not have constituent power, Flanders has recently envisaged the adoption of a “proto-subnational Bill of Rights”, called the Charter for Flanders. This study briefly recalls that process, explains the legal nature of the resulting (unadopted) text, determines to what extent this text can be called “paralegal”, tries to show – in the light of the Swiss experience – what Belgium could gain from fully-fledged subnational Constitutions in terms of fundamental Rights protection and of legal certainty if such Constitutions were authorized and assesses the hypothesis of a linkage between the federated Charters debate, on the one hand, and the project to “update” title II of the Federal Constitution, i.e. the Belgian Bill of Rights, on the other hand.
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