States of Emergency and Ethnic Conflict in Liberal Democracies: Great Britain and Israel

In constitutional theory, the declared purpose of a state of emergency is to restore the established constitutional order. Several liberal democracies have been employing emergency measures for many years to deal with internal ethnic conflict. Two notable cases are Israel and the United Kingdom that have maintained a state of emergency for over five decades. This raises an important question: Does the state of emergency that is designed to restore constitutional order actually yield an undesirable legal order? Our findings suggest that emergency measures in both countries have permanently changed the nature of the democratic constitutional order. This new order grants the executive branch of government special powers at the expense of the legislature and judiciary. This finding should be remembered before declaring a national state of emergency rather than allowing ' ‘temporary’ emergency provisions to become entrenched permanently in the legal system.