Systèmes - Droit constitutionnel britannique - 3e - 15

Foreword to the third edition
provocatively named Bill of Rights Bill5
seeks in reality to qualify and
diminish the judicial protection hitherto afforded by the Human
Rights Act6
, and so (it appears) to open up differences between the
application of such rights in Strasbourg and the United Kingdom. The
Bill also contains an astonishing provision, prohibiting any court
from taking any account of any interim measure by the European
Court of Human Rights. At least one member of the government
would have liked to go further, and, by withdrawing from the Convention,
put the United Kingdom in the company of Russia and Belarus.
Another contested measure is the Retained EU Law (Revocation
and Reform) Bill, which would at the end of 2023 simply revoke all
retained EU law which was before Brexit directly applicable in the
UK as well as all EU-derived subordinate legislation, unless the
same was meanwhile restated or a minister specified some later
expiry date. Thousands of pieces of legislation would potentially be
revoked, with consequent risks to both legal protection and coherence,
in areas from, for example, employment to consumer protection
and environmental standards. The legislation would, if passed,
also give the executive extraordinarily wide " Henry VIII " powers,
that is power for ministers to reform the law by delegated legislation,
which it is notorious that Parliament cannot properly scrutinise.7
Other
controversial areas include the wider powers conferred on
police to restrict protests by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and
Courts Act 2022 and the further governmental proposal for a Public
Order Bill with provisions seen by many as potentially detrimental to
the rights of freedom of expression and protest.
The sadness is the potential detriment that these proposals and
recent political and economic turmoil may have inflicted on the United
Kingdom's reputation internationally and as a safe haven for the
conduct of business as well as the resolution of disputes. In the
penultimate paragraph of his work, Professor Antoine comments
cuttingly on the ambitions of Global Britain as being « passablement
déconnectées de la réalité de ce qu'est aujourd'hui la place du
5. Polemically named, because it invokes the Bill of Rights 1688 by which liberties really were
maintained. It has been suggested that the Bill of Rights Bill should have been named the
Bill to remove or qualify Rights.
6. This 1998 Act gave domestic force from October 2020 to the rights contained in the European
Convention on Human Rights.
7. Henry VIII powers are beloved of the executive, and Parliament cannot generally do more
than approve or refuse delegated legislation, when put before it for consideration, rather
than amend it. In practice, very few pieces of delegated legislation are rejected.
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Systèmes - Droit constitutionnel britannique - 3e

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