Sovereignity Of The Constitution: The Sovereignty Of Parliament

‘’The sovereignty of Parliament is (from a legal point of view) the dominant characteristic of our political institutions’’.

Dicey’s account of parliamentary sovereignty is one that believes that Parliament ‘‘has the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament’’. This account gives an appearance of complete power over English law and ergo England itself. However, legally speaking, this essay argues that despite the lack of a hierarchically greater body of law – specifically constitutional – allowing the government to act without restraint by passing legislation, Dicey’s account of parliamentary sovereignty

The Aarhus Convention, of which the EU is a signatory, declares that ‘‘public authorities, in response to a request for environmental information, make such information available to the public within the framework of national legislation’’, and under Article 9 anyone who believes to have been ‘ignored, wrongfully refused…inadequately answered or otherwise not dealt with in accordance with the provisions of that article’ thus reinforcing judicial review in the Evans case against the executive ‘‘dominant characteristic’’ Diceyan theory expounds. This EU supremacy is upheld by the Blackburn case which sees the ‘unbinding’ yet ‘irrevocable’ Treaty of Rome where a surrender of sovereign power is admitted, with the legal explanation that no parliament can bind a future parliament, to which Lord Denning replied ‘‘Freedom once given cannot be taken away’’. This small surrender of power already defeats the concept of absolute parliamentary sovereignty, and may be seen as an impetus for further illustrating its archaicity in a modern setting. The Treaty of Rome, along with other treaties put forth under the European Communities Act 1972 such as the Maastricht Treaty 1992 and the recent Treaty of Lisbon 2009 that reduce the powers of sovereignty as they branch out their power over a greater range of U.K.