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Comment by Aerroon | Hacker News Reader

I'm slowly becoming of the opinion that legislators should be punished for creating laws that are nakedly illegal (against the constitution/human rights that have been agreed upon). I don't know what can of worms it would open, but it's getting tiring when politicians just ignore the public and push forward with laws that then spend 5 years in court battles to eventually be struck down. But for those 5 years their bullshit law is active. Eg EU data retention act.

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In a country that doesn't have a written constitution [0] (per se), and is continually trying to renege on what human rights have been agreed [1], what would there be to punish against?

0: https://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/articles/britains-unwritten-co...

1: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/05/tory-mps-to...

exactly, there's a lot of very weird "Everywhere Is Like The US, Presumably" commenting in this thread

Presumably the proposal is for the UK and such places to adopt a written constitution guaranteeing certain rights to the population, and then punish government officials for violating it.

The most effective version is probably not the ability to sue for damages, but rather that if the highest court rules a law unconstitutional, anyone who voted in favor of it is ineligible to run for reelection. This would both get the perpetrators out of office and make them much more cautious about violating the rights of the population.

This issue doesn't only happen in the UK though. And for now the UK is bound by the ECHR.

That’s a dumb way to run things, though. Lawmakers should be punished according to the most expansive definition of human rights that is plausible under the system. If the sort of constitutional/basic laws are ill defined and constantly changing, that’s problem #1 and they should be heavily incentivized to fix it.

There is no such thing as an illegal Act of Parliament in the UK. Parliament has unfettered power to pass whatever laws it sees fit, regardless of existing laws, treaties, or whatever.

(At least, that's the standard interpretation, though some authorities have suggested it's not quite as simple as that: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty_in_t... for details.)

To take this to an extreme, are you saying that under UK law, it would be legal for Parliament to legalize slavery or permit other activities that would unconscionable and illegal without such action?

Yes to my understanding. Parliament makes the laws. No court can override Parliament. No existing law binds Parliament. The only thing stopping this is how incredibly embarrassing it would be and individual MPs might lose their next election.

https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/parliame...

> To take this to an extreme, are you saying that under UK law, it would be legal for Parliament to legalize slavery or permit other activities that would unconscionable and illegal without such action?

definitely. why is this surprising? countries permit all sorts of unconscionable things (the US had slavery and only banned it "except as a punishment for crime", literally has the death penalty right now) and by definition legislatures turn things from "illegal" to "legal" and vice versa constantly. the US could re-legalise slavery via a constitutional amendment any time it wanted, Ireland could ban divorce again, Australia could un-repeal Section 127, etc etc.

the only difference in the UK is that there's no "basic law" / "constitution" that's harder to change than regular laws.

Yes. The Supreme Court might declare such a law incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (incorporated into UK law under the Human Rights Act), but that does not in itself invalidate the law: it would remain the law until Parliament amended it or repealed it (if it ever did).

> legislators should be punished for creating laws that are nakedly illegal (against the constitution/human rights that have been agreed upon)

Unfortunately, this cuts both ways.

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