Source: https://eutopialaw.com/2014/07/21/not-waving-but-drowning-european-law-in-the-uk-courts/
Timestamp: 2017-09-24 17:44:03
Document Index: 52427848

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 102', 'UKHL ', '§ 29', '§ 59', 'UKSC ', 'UKSC ', 'UKSC ', '§ 133', 'UKSC ', 'CJEU ', '§ 207', '§ 97', '§ 98']

Not waving, but drowning ? : European law in the UK courts | eutopialaw
Posted on July 21, 2014 by eutopialaw
The relationship between EU law and the municipal law of the United Kingdom seems to lend itself to allusions to water. In Bulmer v. Bollinger [1974] Ch. 401 Lord Denning famously referred (at 418F) to the incoming tide of EU law, observing that “it flows into the estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back, Parliament has decreed that the Treaty is henceforward to be part of our law. It is equal in force to any statute.” And the Factortame litigation, too, was all about water, and the right to fish in it – specifically the Treaty based rights of Spanish fishermen not to be subject to discrimination on grounds of nationality when seeking to exercise their free movement rights to trawl for fish in UK waters.
Our courts are, of course, not insensible to this shift, this seeming turning of the political tide. Recent judgments of the UK Supreme Court, in particular, have marked an increasing turn inward, as the continental is abandoned for the insular and the primacy of national constitutional fundamentals are re-emphasised over the provisions of international Treaties. But what “constitutional fundamentals”, you might well ask ? Classically, the only constitutional fundamental which existed in the UK under the Diceyan analysis of the constitution was the sovereignty of Parliament – and that has been considered and dealt with in Factortame. What, then, is left within the UK constitution after Factortame ? The judicial and extra-judicial writings of Sir John Laws seem to provide the beginnings of an answer. In R v Lord Chancellor Ex p Witham [1998] QB 575 he noted (at 581) that “in the unwritten legal order of the British state” it is “the common law [which] continues to accord a legislative supremacy to Parliament”. He also observed that the courts should recognise certain fundamental rights at common law whose “existence would not be the consequence of the democratic political process but would be logically prior to it”. In Thoburn v. Sunderland Council [2003] QB 151 he noted (at 185) that “the traditional doctrine [of Parliamentary sovereignty] has in my judgment been modified. It has been done by the common law, wholly consistently with constitutional principle” by the recognition of certain statutes as “constitutional” in the sense that, while not being entrenched, their provisions were not subject to implied repeal by later “ordinary” Acts of Parliament. Parliament could modify their terms, but only expressly. In Jackson v. Attorney General [2006] 1 AC 262Lord Steyn went further, suggesting (at § 102), that there might be some constitutional fundamentals “which even a sovereign Parliament acting at the behest of a complaisant House of Commons cannot abolish”. Despite some initial scepticism about the need or utility for reliance upon notions of common law constitutionalism in a post HRA/post EU Charter era (see for example Watkins v. Home Office[2006] UKHL 17 [2006] 2 AC 395 per Lord Bingham at § 29 and per Lord Rodger at §§ 59, 61) the ideas of Sir John Laws appear now to have triumphed into the new constitutional orthodoxy. They were certainly central to the finding of the UKSC in Axa General Insurance Company Ltd v Lord Advocate [2011] UKSC 46 [2012] AC 868 that statutes of the devolved legislatures were subject to a form of common law review (for breach of the rule of law and/or fundamental common law rights). In Kennedy v Charity Commission [2014] UKSC 20 [2014] 2 WLR 808 Lord Toulson at § 133 regretted what he saw as “a baleful and unnecessary tendency to overlook the common law. It needs to be emphasised that it was not the purpose of the Human Rights Act that the common law should become an ossuary.” In R (Buckinghamshire County Council) v Transport Secretary [2014] UKSC 3 [2014] 1 WLR 342 Lord Neuberger and Lord Mance – in rejecting what looked like a fairly clear line of CJEU case law on the issue of what might properly be expected in and of a Strategic Environmental Assessment for large infrastructure projects (such as HS2) – suggested that there may be constitutional fundamentals which even EU law could not overcome. As they noted (at § 207) that
Now at one level one can see this move “back to (common law) basics” as a canny response from our higher judiciary to a political climate of ever increasing hostility toward all things European and legal, and an oft-expressed distaste by certain politicians and journalists for un(der)-qualified foreign judges making judgment on British ways. But is it a wholly wise move ? Even a cursory look at the “constitutional instruments” now being increasingly relied upon as sources of law shows that they have to be cleansed and de-contextualised by our judges if they are to do the work called upon them to be the source of our current constitutional principles and basic rights in the 21st century. So many of these historic constitutional instruments are premised precisely on inequality of treatment: whether of serfs, or Jews and women, in the case of Magna Carta; or of Catholics under the Bill of Rights 1688, the Act of Settlement 1701 and the Acts of Union 1707. It is certainly difficult to draw from their terms the claim made by Lord Mance in Axa General Insurance Company Ltd v Lord Advocate [2012] 1 AC 868 at § 97 that at the “very core” of common law fundamental rights and notions of the rule of law lie “principles of equality of treatment”.
But the openness of the courts to public scrutiny cannot be the sole criterion to establish the legitimacy of judicial decision-making. There have to be elements, too, of predictability of decision-making and agreed limitation on what the judges can do with the law. It is precisely to embody those virtues and to protect (unelected) judges from allegations that the power they wielded in their decision-making was an undemocratic exercise in the tyranny of the dead (where past precedents rule over present circumstance) that post World War II Bills of Rights – whether the European Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights – were created. Conscious of the danger that the democratic process could itself be subverted and undermined by the political manipulation of the majority (see for example Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) v Turkey (2003) 37 EHRR 1 at §§ 98-9) democratic governments across Europe signed up and continue to sign up to these human rights charters, to ensure that minorities can be protected. These charters and the bodies of law which have built up around should not be too readily abandoned, nor the mechanisms for their enforcement be too readily disparaged by our own courts, echoing political and popular sentiment. The architecture of enforcement involved international courts and bodies – whether the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union or the UN Human Right Committee –precisely to ensure the advantages of distance and, to an extent, a necessary isolation from the immediate national political fray. This was, and is, seen as necessary in order to ensure a degree of objectivity and protection for the individual even against the interests of the nation State in all its forms and manifestation and emanations. Let’s then hold on to these international charters, value their developed and developing jurisprudence lest, to end on a last watery metaphor, we lose the (fundamental rights) baby in jettisoning the (foreign) bathwater.
‘Not Waving But Drowning’, Stevie Smith
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