Tag: Parliamentary sovereignty
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Joanna Bell & Hayley J Hooper: Not in my (Constitutional) Backyard: How Not to Speed Up Planning Challenges
Important issues of UK constitutional law can arise in the most unusual of places. Some of the most important cases on undergraduate reading lists, for example, concerned disputes about fishing licences and whether goods could be measured in imperial, rather than metric, units. In this blog we draw attention to a proposal which, if enacted, would be of…
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Alex Schwartz: Recent Attempts to Curb Judicial Power in the United Kingdom
The era of Conservative Party government from 2015–2024 was one of great constitutional turmoil in the United Kingdom. In addition to (and partly because of) the controversies surrounding the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, this was also a period of heightened debate about the role of the judiciary, fuelling an unprecedented movement within and…
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Sanjit Nagi: A Road to Nowhere: Reforming the European Convention on Human Rights
Over the last few weeks criticism of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR/the Convention) and suggestions that the United Kingdom (U.K) should attempt to reform the supranational instrument, and by extension the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA 1998), have dramatically intensified. Interestingly, calls for reform have not just come from the conservative side of…
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![Elizabeth Adams: The Judicial Approach to the Judicial Discretion under s.4 HRA in Secretary of State for Business and Trade v Mercer [2024] UKSC 12](https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/elizabeth-adams-e1548439339676.png)
Elizabeth Adams: The Judicial Approach to the Judicial Discretion under s.4 HRA in Secretary of State for Business and Trade v Mercer [2024] UKSC 12
In Secretary of State for Business and Trade v Mercer [2024] UKSC 12 (Mercer), the Supreme Court was confronted with whether and how to exercise its powers under sections 3 and 4 of the HRA 1998. This blog post will focus on assessing how the Supreme Court approached the judicial discretion to grant a declaration…
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Sanjit Nagi: “A Mandate for Change!”: Popular Sovereignty and the Labour Party
The recent general election saw the Labour Party being elected with a majority of 171 seats in Parliament. The following morning, in his first speech as Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer claimed the nation had given the Labour Party a “clear mandate”. Similarly, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, stated the British people…
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Mohamed Moussa: From Texas to Scotland: Secessionism and the Vulnerability of Parliamentary Sovereignty
Introduction Recently Texas governor Gregg Abbott openly defied the federal government over migration control. Echoing ‘the secessionist rhetoric’ of the Confederacy and Civil War Era, he claimed that the federal government ‘has broken the compact between the United States and the States’. This incident not only brings to light Texas’s various secessionist movements, such as…
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Jamie McGowan: The Nobile Officium and Public Law: An Undertapped Resource?
Joanna Cherry KC MP has suggested (here and in parliament), somewhat indirectly, that the nobile officium of the Court of Session might, insofar as it “exists to give remedies where there would otherwise be none”, be exercised to limit the effect of the provisions of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill 2023-24. Notably,…
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Raffael N. Fasel: Ouster Clauses and the Silent Constitutional Crisis
In a recent comment on the Government’s Rwanda Bill and on speculations about an unprecedented strike down by the Supreme Court, Professor Mark Elliott asked a question that has been on many UK public lawyers’ minds lately: “Are we headed for a constitutional crisis?” This question, to be sure, is not new. However, with a…
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Adam Tucker: The Rwanda Policy, Legal Fiction(s), and Parliament’s Legislative Authority
Last week the Supreme Court (in R (AAA) v Home Secretary) found the UK government’s policy to send asylum applicants to Rwanda unlawful on the grounds that “removal … to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment by reason of refoulement” [149]. In response, the Prime Minister announced that the government intends…