And here’s the reasoned English decision

Conveniently they’ve produced a summary for publication on football message boards 🤗

Pretty much as I expected - basically “this is politics, not justiciable”

“The court concludes on well established and conventional grounds that the claim is non justiciable - that is, it is not capable of being determined by the courts. A decision to prorogue Parliament is a prerogative power, a discretionary power still in the hands of the Crown. Such a decision is formally made by the Sovereign on the advice of the Privy Council. By constitutional convention the Sovereign invariably acts on the advice of the Prime Minister. [4] Decisions and action of the Executive branch of government are not immune from judicial review merely because they are carried out pursuant to an exercise of the royal prerogative. [34] The first question when considering the court’s power to review the exercise of prerogative powers is whether the subject-matter of the power is non-justiciable. [40] The court rejects the claimant’s submission that it should explore the facts first to decide whether there has been a public law error, and then turn to justiciability. The question of justiciability comes first as a matter of logic and law. [41] The criteria adopted by the courts for identifying non-justiciable exercises of prerogative power are whether they involve matters of high policy or are political. In this way the courts have marked out the separation of power between the Judicial and the Executive branches of government, a fundamental feature of our unwritten constitution. In this context the essential characteristic of a political issue is the absence of judicial or legal standards by which to assess the legality of the Executive’s decision or action. [42] The refusal of the courts to review political questions is well-established. [43] – [50] The defendant’s evidence is that a number of considerations were taken into account by the Prime Minister. They included the need to prepare the Government’s legislative programme for the Queen’s Speech; that Parliament would still have sufficient time before 31 October 2019 to debate Brexit and to scrutinise the Government’s conduct of the European Union withdrawal negotiations; that a number of days falling within the period of prorogation would ordinarily be recess for party conferences; that the parliamentary session had been longer than for the previous 40 years; and that it was increasingly difficult to fill parliamentary time with appropriate work. All of those matters involved intensely political considerations. [10] – [14][51] Both the decision of the Prime Minister that Parliament should be prorogued at the time and for the duration chosen and the advice given by the Prime Minister in the present case were inherently political in nature and there are no legal standards against which to judge their legitimacy. [51] There is no legal measure of the length of time between Parliamentary sessions, nor even a constitutional convention which governs that matter, albeit constitutional conventions are not justiciable. [54] Parliament may be prorogued for various reasons, including political reasons, and there is no statute, law or convention which requires Parliament to sit in constant session. [55]”

Posted By: Old Git on September 11th 2019 at 14:07:03

Message Thread

Reply to Message

In order to add a post to the WotB Message Board you must be a registered WotB user.

If you are not yet registered then please visit the registration page. You should ensure that their browser is setup to accept cookies.

Log in