![handle is hein.journals/ialsrev8 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial
Welcome to the IALS Student Law Review
Tugge Yalgin
Welcome to the COVID-19 Special Issue of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies' Student Law
Review (ISLRev).
The COVID-19 pandemic threw not only the world into a serious shock to all intents and purposes but
caused an historic decline in economic outputs in many countries and raised numerous questions for
states and the societal functioning in general.
The severe and challenging situation also ushered in a rethink of our old habits and seeming
obviousnesses such as meeting friends or working in shared environments. It reminds us about what is
really essential in life, or simply: recalling our humanity and reality - our natural limits of necessity.
In this COV/D-19 Special Issue, we will be reflecting on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected local
legal systems, the introduction of legal regimes to confront the new realities, economies, governments
and the society at large.
We are pleased to introduce the following articles of this COVID-19 Special Issue of the ISLRev:
Dr. Marijana Opashinova Shundovska discusses whether emergency measures in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic are a threat to the democracy by analysing the case of North Macedonia. This
new world order 'Covidism', both autocratic and liberal, proved to be more dangerous in the long run
than the virus which took thousands of lives and infected millions of people worldwide. The 'COVID-19
victimisation' and 'de-democratisation' made representative houses revert to old emergency situations,
conveying the lead to the executives to carry on the entire decision-making process, putting into
question their definition as pillar institutions in the systems of representative democracy. Fighting for
decades to maintain the representative democracy due to the monopolisation of legislation by the
executives in the EU member states, and to the rising of autocratic processes in developing countries,
national parliaments have felt sisyphied over again. Having in mind the ongoing fight with the virus, one
might question how long it will take until national parliaments put the rock up on the hill, this time for
good.
Dr. Fotios Fitsilis and Athanasius Pliakogianni examine the Hellenic Parliament's response to the
COVID-19 pandemic. Legislatures face political crises constantly - they navigate through them using
an institutional weaponry made out of constitutional and standing order provisions, often accompanied
by informal regulations, so-called 'soft law'. Nevertheless, the COVID-19 pandemic took whole societies
by surprise. Constitutions and standing orders do not contain dedicated provisions for such crises. In
the absence of similar precedents, parliaments needed to improvise, often adopting expansive
interpretation of existing provisions. To complicate things further, countries have used various
approaches to combat the pandemic - a fact that also affected the behavior of parliaments.
Dr. Afrim Krasniqi explores the critical situation in Albania due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the
nineties, Albania has declared several national emergencies. The violent riots of 1991 and 1997 were
prominent cases thereof. The state of emergency was invoked six more times since that time owing to
natural disasters. The situation with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 marks a new, unique experience
with fundamental differences from the past. In none of the previous states of emergency have public,
private, parliamentary and judicial activity been effectively suspended, and state propaganda and police
force used as creatively as in 2020. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 found the
country in a situation of political crisis, whilst stuttering in its efforts to recover from the natural disaster
caused by the heavy earthquake of November 2019.
Carmelina Sessa assesses the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the rule of law and pursues the
question of the compatibility of fundamental rights with mass surveillance technologies in democratic
systems by using Italy as an example - ie, the first state in Europe to launch containment measures of
the spread of the virus and to protect public health. Through a comparative approach, she examines
IALS Student Law Review I Volume 8, COVID Special Issue, [Winter 2021], pp. 1-2 1 Page 1
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