PROCEEDINGS OF THE V CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE ACTUALIZACIÓN JURÍDICA

Towards a Constitution for the Earth

Abstract

From March 25 to 27, 2026, Panama City hosted the V Congreso Internacional de Actualización Jurídica, organized by ISAE University and the Center for International Studies under the theme “Towards a Constitution for the Earth.” The conference centered on the proposal advanced by Luigi Ferrajoli in Por una Constitución de la Tierra. La humanidad en la encrucijada (Towards a Constitution of the Earth: Humanity at the Crossroads): a draft global constitution designed to address emergencies that no single state can tackle alone, such as global warming, the nuclear threat, growing inequality, forced migration, and the unchecked concentration of economic power.

The presence of Ferrajoli himself and of Miguel Carbonell, both of whom received honorary doctorates from ISAE University on the opening day, gave the event a distinctive character: the proposal was examined not from a distance but in dialogue with its author and with some of his closest collaborators in Ibero-America.

This volume collects the proceedings of the conference in three parts.

Part I, devoted to global constitutionalism and the Constitution of the Earth, opens with a summary of the keynote discussion in which Luigi Ferrajoli, Miguel Carbonell, and Cristian Ibarra, prompted by a deliberately critical moderator, debated the origin, novelty, and feasibility of the proposal. Five studies follow, each testing the proposal from a different angle. Miguel Carbonell identifies a crisis of scale in constitutionalism: a system designed to limit power within the state now confronts powers and risks that transcend its borders. Jorge Enrique Ibáñez Najar, drawing on the experience of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, highlights the territorial limits of constitutional adjudication and argues for a Universal Constitutional Court. Carlo Ferrajoli takes labor rights as a case study to argue that international guarantee institutions are now a precondition for the effective realization of the rights recognized in national constitutions. Claudia E. Zalazar examines the impact of climate change on health and migration and calls for enhanced protection of the rights of the most vulnerable. Finally, Rodolfo Godoy Peña asks who can bring the proposal to fruition and identifies the university as the setting in which to cultivate leadership grounded in intergenerational responsibility.

Part II, on administrative law, contains the lecture by Grettel Villalaz de Allen, Attorney General for Administrative Affairs (Procuradora de la Administración), on State liability for administrative silence. Her study of Panamanian law begins with the Administration’s duty to decide and concludes with the need for an administrative culture of timely response.

Part III, on criminal procedure, contains summaries of the two expert panels that examined Panama’s adversarial (accusatory) criminal justice system in light of due process guarantees. The first panel asked whether courts act as interpreters or as legislators in criminal proceedings; the second assessed the effectiveness of annulment and cassation appeals as guarantees of appellate review. Both panels reached a conclusion that connects with the central theme of the conference: the remaining challenge lies less in proclaiming guarantees than in securing their effective enforcement.

That thread runs through the entire volume. Whether at the global scale, in the handling of an administrative petition, or in the review of a criminal conviction, the contributions gathered here return to the gap between rights as proclaimed and rights as guaranteed, a problem that Ferrajoli has placed at the center of legal scholarship. The Constitution of the Earth is presented in these pages not as a utopia but as a normative program open to criticism, and the task of examining it falls largely to universities. With the creation of the Traveling Chair, ISAE University has taken on that commitment; with the publication of these proceedings, it makes the conference debates available to the legal community.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Plutarco Hernán Arrocha Rodríguez, founder of ISAE University.