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Eurealist :: The Guardians: “The Guardians
by Eurealist at 12:05PM (BST) on April 26, 2005 | Permanent Link | Cosmos

In the Guardian today we read that the country came close to a constitutional crisis, with some senior judges tempted to defy the will of parliament, when the government proposed an “ouster clause” barring the courts from ruling on the legality of asylum and immigration decisions. The plan was abandoned in March 2004 after an outcry from lawyers and a threat by the former Labour lord chancellor, Lord Irvine, to break the silence he has maintained since he lost his job in June 2003 to speak against it.

Lord Donaldson told the Guardian: “Derry Irvine put his foot down implicitly and they abandoned that.

“Had they successfully pursued the ouster clause then we certainly should have been in a very interesting constitutional crisis. If they really did that - and people like James Mackay [the former Tory lord chancellor] thought as a matter of wording it was wholly effective and stopped up every loophole - we would simply have to say: ‘We [the judges] are an independent estate of the realm and it’s not open to the legislature to put us out of business. And so we shall simply ignore your ouster clause.’”

The Guardian

Senior judges also fear that a succession of recent laws pushed through by the government could fetter their ability to administer justice and to act as a check on the executive.

Other areas of great concern to the judges are explained in “a rare series of interviews, five judges in the high court and court of appeal have told the Guardian of their concerns about laws on sentencing, control orders for terror suspects, and public inquiries, which they see as attempts to limit their role.

Their worries at apparent attempts to marginalise the judges are echoed by other senior legal figures, including the former master of the rolls, Lord Donaldson.

Laws which concern the judges include:

· the recently implemented Criminal Justice Act 2003, which imposes mandatory and minimum sentences, reducing the judges’ discretion to fit the punishment to the individual case;

· the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, which allows the home secretary to restrict individuals’ liberty on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities, with minimal oversight by the judges;

· the Inquiries Act 2005, which restricts the independence of judges appointed to chair inquiries, allowing ministers to decide what evidence is given in public and to block the disclosure of evidence.

Lord Saville, the law lord chairing the Bloody Sunday inquiry, has written to the constitutional affairs minister, Lady Ashton, that the Inquiries Act “makes a very serious inroad into the independence of any inquiry and is likely to damage or destroy public confidence in the inquiry and its findings

Another judge said: “While the judges will be courageous in standing up for individual rights and civil liberties in the way they did in the Belmarsh case, it is dangerous for the judges to get too far out of step with public opinion.

“It has to be pointed out to the public that these quite draconian measures [control orders] apply to them - not just to bad people but to everybody.

“They may think that the government will only apply them to bad people but there is a risk that they will be applied to cases where they’re not justified.”

A high court judge added: “I think the executive takes too much power in relation to terrorism and in relation to shutting people up without trial.”

Eurealist :: Sending out the Bill to the EU Elites: “Sending out the Bill to the EU Elites
by Eurealist at 12:34PM (BST) on April 26, 2005 | Permanent Link | Cosmos

The elites are getting ‘the bill for the non-involvement of its citizens and the autism of its governments.’ And they do not like it! As always with these elitist unelected and unaccountable Eurocrats they find someone else to blame, rather than accepting the fact that they have progressed their union beyond the bounds of acceptability of the ordinary people.

This time it former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing who throws his hat in the ring, Giscard, who as chairman of the convention that drew up the constitution ensured that only those things which he wanted managed to get into the debates, and almost single handled wrote the draft text, now complains after a series of opinion polls has suggested that the constitution will be rejected, possibly by a large margin. That it his country’s present political leaders have done little to win backing for a ‘yes’ vote in the upcoming referendum.

‘They (French political leaders) are not personally engaged in Europe’s construction, unlike previous top officials,’ said Giscard d’Estaing in an interview to appear in Monday’s edition of the national daily France Soir.

He said also that he and his successor as president, Francois Mitterrand, had got the European message across to the French but this was no longer the case.

Because these people have protected power without a democratic mandate, they like to sneer at those lesser souls who must convince the voters that they are doing the best they can for their citizens, whilst all the time the EU itself is tying their hands, as this shows through in the way they manage the country, it is the elected politicians who carry the can from a disenchanted public, but what are the people to do, they cannot influence the real government so they must do anything they can to bring their politicians to heel, by voting against anyone who does not accept the responsibility of their position. It is no good then for those elites who have consistently denied the voter a say in EU matters complaining about results of their own fanaticism.”