Future Britain Bill of Rights

The Observer home affairs editor Jamie Doward reports on the formation of “Future Britain” which he describes as the broadest coalition in history devoted to constitutional change. He says “Future Britain” is an unprecedented alliance, including the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, Charter 88, Justice, Liberty and a host of constitutional reform organisations, and is to be formed to campaign for a new bill of rights, amid growing concerns that laws protecting personal liberty are out of date.

The coalition, Future Britain, will be formed in February and is to be co-ordinated by academics at the London School of Economics. It will conclude around the next general election, when its supporters believe the issue will become a key electoral battleground. Those behind the alliance want to foster a debate about what should be in the new bill and how it should be implemented. It says it is apolitical in an attempt to make its appeal as wide as possible.

Unfortunately Doward then goes of the rails a touch when he describes the present situation Human rights in the UK are enshrined in the Human Rights Act, the UK’s interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights. And reports Peter Facey, director of Charter 88, saying ‘We have Magna Carta, which is great if you can read Old English or if you are a baron. But what we need is a document that sets out our fundamental values.’

In fact the HRA does not challenge Parliamentary supremacy, all it allows is for the courts to state if an act of Parliament contravenes the Human Rights Convention; it does not pass Parliamentary power to the courts. If the courts do find a contravention it is still up to Parliament to decide the issue, parliament could well take a different view and the courts would have no say in the matter.

What is so very eerily strange about this article is the compleate lack of any reference to the present bill of rights which underpins what was in effect the new British State. It embodied the Declaration of Rights and established Parliament as the primary governing body of the country. That the Bill of Rights is still basic statute law in Britian is not even open to question, although many would like, as in this case. to ignore its existence.

Betty Boothroyd the Speaker of the House of Commons issued the following statement:
“There has of course been no amendment to the Bill of Rights … the House is entitled to expect that the Bill of Rights will be fully respected by all those appearing before the courts”
(Hansard, 21 July 1993 column 352).

However in recent years politicians have ignored the existence of the bill of Rights when making legislation this has created several problems with that legislation because of a judgement made by Lord Justice Laws;

Lord Justice Laws said in the ‘Metric Martyrs’ judgement “We should recognise a hierarchy of Acts of Parliament: as it were “ordinary” statutes and “constitutional” statutes. The two categories must be distinguished on a principled basis. In my opinion a constitutional statute is one which (a) conditions the legal relationship between citizen and State in some general, overarching manner, or (b) enlarges or diminishes the scope of what we would now regard as fundamental constitutional rights. (a) and (b) are of necessity closely related: it is difficult to think of an instance of (a) that is not also an instance of (b). The special status of constitutional statutes follows the special status of constitutional rights. Examples are the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights 1689, the Act of Union, the Reform Acts which distributed and enlarged the franchise, the HRA, the Scotland Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 1998.”

A further problem is that the Bill of Rights 1689 was not an ordinary act of Parliament it was an act of settlement which actually sets up the legality for the present state and give Parliament its power in the first place. It also clearly states that changes to it, were themselves illegal. So on one hand (if we take Laws ruling) the Bill of Rights has precedence over any later legislation which does not specifically state it is changing the Bill of Rights, on the other we have as situation where any act which does challenge the Bill of rights is illegal.

It is therefore not surprising that in these days when our Political elites like to belive it is within their remit to anything they wish, that they would like to ignore an act which makes it clear that their power is limited and trumped by the our basic rights. This is the major difference between the British system and that which is used as the basis for EU law; our state is only empowered to protect our previously existing basic rights against the state, in EU Law it is the state which grants the rights, the last thing we need in this country is our government codifying those basic rights it is prepared to allow.