The inevitable legal challenge to the Hunting Act has started, in fact two of them according to today's Guardian. The first is the attempt to rule the Parliament Act 1949 invalid. Um, hang about here, it's taken people 55 years to bring a claim that a law has been invalidly passed? If I send a claim into an Employment Tribunal more than three months after the incident then it's ruled out of time and these jokers want to go back and rule something 55 years old as invalid.
If the Parliament Act 1949 were to be struck down, I believe it would be the very first law that has been repealed by the courts (1) and not by the elected legislature, as the problems with "judical activism" in the US show, it's not a road we want to go down in this country. If it is repealed, does that mean that the laws that have passed as a result of the Parliament Act being used are repealed as well? Surely that's the obvious answer as the Countryside Alliance want the Hunting Act to be repealed. So that's the following acts done away with:
War Crimes Act 1991 (which allows suspected Nazi war criminals to be tried in UK courts even though the crime took place outside the UK)
European Parliamentary Elections Act 1999 (so all the UK members of the European Parliament's elections are invalid - come in Kilroy, your time is up)
Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000 (the one that equalised the gay age of consent down to 16)
So are the Countryside Alliance pro-Nazi, anti-UKIP and anti-gay now?
Personally, I've always been agnostic about the merits of the hunting ban, if I were an MP I wouldn't have supported it at first, but all the comments of the countryside lobby have pushed me into supporting the ban, just to make it clear to these people that they are not exempt from the law of this country. I am as ever indebted to Melanie Phillips for helping me decide what to think on an issue (opposing Phillips is always a sensible position) with her rant which includes this pearl of wisdom
"But this Act, which has only been used on three occasions, is a draconian measure which is supposed to be restricted to the most fundamental issues."
Err, Melanie, all the three bills above are important up to a point, but does the change from a First past the post to a Closed party list system for Euro Elections really class as fundamental?
Later I will investigate the delicious absurdity of using that bogeyman of Mail readers everywhere, the Human Rights Act to scupper the Act.
(1) I believed wrong, as Drake points out in the comments, the Merchant Shipping Act 1988 had been overturned in the past. My apologies.
Thank you for that information Drake, I couldn't think of an overturn and a cursory Goggle search didn't come up with anything but I was not sure, hence the believe, I'll make the correction forthwith.
ReplyDeleteI think the larger point stands however, getting the courts to overturn the Hunting Act would open a can of worms that really shouldn't be touched. It wouldn't be good for this country if we had politicised judges and the kind of judicial activism they have in the US. The right and proper way to repeal the Hunting Act is to do it in the House of Commons, that would be a celebration of democracy, having it overturned in the European Court of Human Rights would be something else.