Yahoo Finance Supreme Court 'should be renamed' after controversial Brexit ruling, report claims
The Supreme Court should be renamed following the decision to overturn the prorogation of parliament earlier this year, a right-wing think-tank has suggested.
In its latest report, Policy Exchange said the government should make reversing the prorogation judgment and changing the court’s name its’ top priorities.
The report proposes a major reform to the system under a new bill they suggest should be called the “Constitutional Restoration Act”.
The act would rename the Supreme Court the “Upper Court of Appeal” to indicate its role as an adjudicator in legal disputes, rather than acting as a US-style guardian of the constitution.
The report further claims judicial power has grown at the expense of parliamentary democracy and says ministers should be more involved in appointing judges.
It warned that Remain campaigner Gina Miller’s victory over the government last December was a “watershed” moment which threatened to “rupture the political constitution”.
Former Conservative leader Michael Howard QC, wrote the foreword for the study in which he claimed the current situation of the judicial system was “not a happy state of affairs”.
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Earlier this week, Lord Howard claimed judges sometimes “distort” the law they are interpreting to “reach they result they want to achieve”.
He claimed that judges have “increasingly substituted their own view of what is right for the view of parliament and of ministers”.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he questioned whether it should be elected politicians or unelected judges who make the law.
“Partly because they were invited by parliament under the Human Rights Act to enter the political arena by considering, for example, whether the measures that parliament had taken to deal with a particular problem were proportionate to the objectives they wanted to achieve.
“So, those two things have led to a significant increase in the power of the judges at the expense of parliament and indeed government.”
He added: “Sometimes in order to reach the result they want to achieve, they … distort the meaning of the Act of Parliament of which they are interpreting.”
Lord Howard said the law states that proceedings in parliament should not be impeached in any court but that the outgoing Supreme Court president Baroness Hale said because prorogation was not a decision of parliament, it did not amount to a proceeding.
