So, what exactly is sovereignty? Is it taking back control? Is it legitimacy? Is it a privilege or a responsibility? How has it shaped international relations? The trigger for this was the wish of the King to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, something that the Pope did not allow. While, notoriously, the King moved to have four more wives, his decision is a focal point in the history of sovereignty. By asking the parliament to help him with claiming back authority from the Pope, King Henry not only set off the process of English reformation, but eventually added to the power of the parliament.
In the following decades, this will eventually lead to the parliament challenging the Monarchs themselves and arising as sovereign, something that Henry probably did not foresee see also Loades Similar trends in the way people were organising themselves were also taking places throughout Europe.
A couple of centuries after the Peace of Westphalia, sovereignty and the way it was applied in international relations was to be redefined again. Colonialism extended the sovereignty of imperial powers around the globe and over a range of colonies.
It was largely based on assumptions that the coloniser was superior to the colonised, including in their ability to organise politics see also Jackson In this regard, sovereignty during this era was a privilege, as people in the colonies were not regarded worthy of ruling themselves.
But this was to change again. Since colonised peoples were exposed to sovereignty ideas they eventually claimed self-determination for themselves. An array of developments led to a wave of anticolonial movements and soon former colonies enjoyed a newfound sovereignty. This resulted in a peak in the growth of membership of UN, as the newly independent nations joined the club of states. Unlike earlier periods where the focus was on internal sovereignty, i.
What seems to matter more now is not whether an entity looks like a state, which many former colonies did not, but whether it is recognised as such. As a result, many former colonies were recognised as states despite being unable to govern and impose control on important chunks of territory within borders. Google Analytics tracking has been deactivated for this browser on this website. This cookie is valid until Note: If third-party cookies are allowed in your browser, this also applies to polyas.
Skip to main content. Parliamentary Sovereignty Parliamentary sovereignty means that parliament is superior to the executive and judicial branches of government , and can therefore enact or repeal any law it chooses. Does this mean that any judicial finding that might paint Parliament in a bad light or which might result in political pressure on Parliament to change the law would infringe parliamentary sovereignty?
This would be absurd. Yet, what else are we to conclude from these comments that pressure to avoid opprobrium limits legislative powers? The Court could have distinguished the provisions in the HRA from the provisions in these Bills, stressing that the HRA did not qualify sovereignty, but these Bills might.
This was central to its reasoning. The HRA is not unconstitutional because Parliament is seemingly empowered to qualify its own sovereignty, but the upshot of this judgement is that parliamentary sovereignty is undermined or qualified by judicial findings that impose pressure on Parliament to avoid the opprobrium entailed by them.
Parliament is free to direct the courts to do this, thus qualifying its own sovereignty and so the qualification is not unconstitutional. But what about other organs of state? Are the courts themselves free to qualify or undermine sovereignty in this manner by publishing judgments that create similar opprobrium but where the defence that Parliament qualified its own sovereignty is not present?
It would be absurd if politically disadvantageous judicial findings qualified sovereignty. This is made all the more striking when we consider that the court did not need to base its reasoning on this conception of sovereignty.
It could have maintained the, admittedly flimsy, distinction between sovereignty and unqualified legislative power introduced in the Continuity Bill judgment. Indeed, as Elliott and Kilford note, this is exactly what the Court did with regards to s 28 7 and the analogy with s 3 HRA. Having introduced a gun in the first half of the judgement, it refused to fire it in the second half, preferring instead to ground the ratio of this part of its judgement on the affect these provisions have on parliamentary sovereignty.
This was orthodox and correct. Its expansion of sovereignty to include political effectiveness, first in the Continuity Bill case and now here, proves too much. If Parliament is worried that it may face political backlash for acting or failing to act in a given area, then our constitutional order is working. A central tenet of political constitutionalism is that political entities are best held to account through the political process.
That method of accountability cannot and should not be construed as a limitation on sovereignty. The Supreme Court opining on the political aspects of parliamentary politics would be relatively unimportant if it were not using this expansive definition of sovereignty to ground its adjudication of legal disputes.
This strained understanding of what constitutes an interference with the ability of Parliament to make law has concrete practical implications, given that it has used this to radically alter the devolution settlement. What was once seen to be squarely within the realm of politics has begun to be juridified and this is a mistake, the full implications of which have yet to be seen.
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