On February 17, 2026, a roundtable discussion was organised at the Berlin World Forum on the Future of Democracy, AI/Tech and Humankind on the topic of "Separation of Powers: Safeguarding Electoral Independence, Judicial Autonomy, and Constitutional Military Command."
Attending the debate alongside the President of the Scientific Council of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Levant Culture and Civilization, Emeritus Professor Emil Constantinescu, were Egils Levits (President of Latvia 2019-2023 and judge at the European Court of Justice 2004-2009), András Baka (President of the Supreme Court of Hungary 2009-2012) and Hans Köchler (President of the International Progress Organisation and of the Working Group for Science and Politics at the University of Innsbruck).
In order to establish constitutional standards for democratic governance that can forestall abuses of executive power, and to redact implementable recommendations to consolidate systems of checks and balances over electoral systems, over judicial independence and over military command structures, discussions focused on identifying the constitutional mechanisms that best preserve the independence of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, as well as supplementary systems of checks and balances required to prevent democratic backsliding or constitutional crisis; who should decide nominations to a country's highest court and what the selection and disqualifying criteria that best safeguard judicial independence and impartiality are; how constitutional frameworks can balance sovereignty and self-determination in agreements between autonomous territories and the broader state (as in the case of Greenland and Denmark, or Scotland and the United Kingdom); what institutional guarantees base protect elections from outside interference, manipulation and fraud, while at the same time preserving transparency and public trust; what mechanisms can ensure that military forces only carry out lawful and constitutional orders, and how can institutional guarantees prevent armed forces from becoming an instrument of unconstitutional power.
In his address, Professor Emil Constantinescu drew upon his experience as a head of state at a critical moment in contemporary history: "In Eastern Europe, the first objective of we presidents elected through direct popular vote, burdened with enormous hopes and few means of fulfilling them, was to become guarantors of the new democratic constitutions, such that their provisions are worth more than the paper they were written on. The only weapon at our disposal was our moral integrity and professional prestige. We fully met these conditions and left behind a legacy of commitment to democratic constitutions and democracy as an ideal. I believe that this example is useful in countering certain tendencies toward decline in Western democracies, which were our model in the 1990s, but also for countries that are currently attempting to transition from superficial democracies to consolidated democracies, as well as for those that wish to transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes, either now or in the future."
