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Comment by _puk | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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