On June 28, Honduran President José Manuel Zelaya was arrested by the military of his own country, put on a plane to Costa Rica and ousted from power. The removal, which had been authorized by the Supreme Court of Honduras, was condemned by much of the world - including the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the United States and the European Union - as a coup d'état. Was the recent crisis in Honduras indeed a coup, or a constitutional change of regime?

That was the question examined by a group of experts at a panel discussion at Georgetown Law on October 21. The event was hosted by the Georgetown University Center for the Advancement of the Rule of Law in the Americas (CAROLA), the Latin American Law Students Association (LALSA), and Foreign Lawyers at Georgetown (FLAG).

CAROLA Director and Professor Joseph A. Page, along with Professor Vicki Jackson, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law, moderated the discussion, which looked at the legal issues involved in the recent events in Honduras. Jackson provided an introduction that not only outlined the events of last summer in Honduras but explained why she personally found the constitutional issues so interesting.

"What does the constitution of Honduras provide?" Jackson asked, as she framed three key issues for the crowd. "Does international law that may be binding upon on Honduras prohibit the interruption of the term of an elected president under these circumstances? ... [And do] we have some kind of transnational constitutionalism going on, an understanding that constrains what domestic constitutions can do?"

Douglass Cassel, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, said he considered what happened on June 28 a coup d'état - an unconstitutional overthrow of the then-existing government. He noted that the Organization of American States, acting in light of its Inter-American Democratic Charter, suspended the membership of Honduras in that international organization in July, finding by a 33-0 vote that there had been an "unconstitutional alteration of the democratic order." And examining the various provisions of the Honduran constitution, none of the theories cited to justify Zelaya's removal held water, Cassel asserted.

"Even though one must, as an international lawyer, pay great respect to the views of the Honduran jurists on the meaning of their own constitution, there are limits," he said. "You can't make your constitution mean whatever you want it to mean after the fact."

Opposing that argument was Miguel Estrada, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who came to this country from Honduras as a teenager. Estrada said there was a credible basis - when looking at the language of the country's constitution - for the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress to remove Zelaya as president (although he agreed that sending Zelaya to Costa Rica was clearly illegal.) And he pointed out, too, the pitfalls of outsiders attempting to impose their own ideas of how the Honduran constitution should work.

"It is [as if we in the United States] think that you people [in Honduras] don't have adequate process on how you oust your own leaders, and we're going to enforce our understanding of how the world works," he said.

Georgetown Law Adjunct Professor Dante Figueroa pointed out that constitutions are in fact imperfect - and that to understand a constitution of a specific country, one needs to understand its history, which in the case of Honduras has been marked by many illegal dictatorships and a struggle for power between the branches of government. Cassel, for one, noted that everyone must feel a great deal of sympathy for the nation of Honduras.

"Even before the current economic crisis, Honduras was one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere," he said. "Now, on top of that, the recent political crisis has aggravated economic circumstances . we need to keep in mind the context of poverty and exclusion which is suffered by the vast majority of people in Honduras."