Bills of Rights

HM Leader of the Opposition (you can call him Dave) has been making headlines recently by proposing that the Human Rights Act be repealed in favour of a thoroughly British Bill of Rights, on the American model. Of course, as Mr Island so rightly points out, we already have a Bill of Rights written at the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1689, so ante dating the American one by nearly 100 years.

As I commented on Mr Island's blog, I think the current government should have taken a close look at our Bill of Rights before proposing the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, in particular the first clause:

• That the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal.

Of course, these days regal authority is exercised in the form of the Royal Prerogative by Ministers of the Crown rather than Her Maj. wielding her sceptre. Even so, the controversy over the Government's attempts to circumvent the approval of Parliament only died down when the act was heavily diluted. Mr Liadnan has much more on this.

Reading further down the list of clauses another one stood out:

• That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction, are illegal and void.

It's a perfectly sound statement and at first glace appears to be the kind of thing that has been upheld by all free and fair societies both before and since this kind of clause was first codified. That is until you consider that every parking fine, every penalty fare, every on-the-spot charge for littering or publicly urinating and every speeding ticket breaks this rule. Any fine which is handed out before conviction at trial is outlawed by this.

Of course I'm not proposing that these penalties are somehow not sound or reasonable, but I do vaguely remember someone who decided to put this to the test. As far as I remember, he was going to challenge a parking fine, with just this kind of reasoning. I'd really like to know how he got on, and assuming he got nowhere with his challenge, exactly how it was dismissed without devaluing the Bill of Rights.