Constitution of the Netherlands

The Dutch constitution, the Grondwet, traces its current form to the 1815 constitution that established the Kingdom of the Netherlands under King William I. It was fundamentally revised in 1848 under the statesman Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, whose reforms introduced ministerial responsibility to parliament and direct elections and substantially curtailed the monarch's personal power, transforming the country into a genuine constitutional monarchy. A further major revision in 1983 modernized and expanded the document's guarantees of fundamental rights. The Netherlands is among the oldest continuously operating constitutional monarchies in Europe, and its constitution carries an unusual feature: Article 120 bars the ordinary courts from testing acts of the States General, the Dutch parliament, against the constitution itself, leaving constitutional compliance chiefly to the legislative process rather than judicial review.