Lord Brian Kerr, the United Kingdom's longest-ever serving Supreme Court justice who stepped down from his position in September, has told The Guardian newspaper that the country's courts should continue to have the ability to challenge the government
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th October, 2020) Lord Brian Kerr, the United Kingdom's longest-ever serving Supreme Court justice who stepped down from his position in September, has told The Guardian newspaper that the country's courts should continue to have the ability to challenge the government.
The former Supreme Court justice's comments follow criticism by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel against "lefty" human rights lawyers who are reportedly frustrating the Home Office's attempts to deport people with no right to remain in the UK.
"If we are operating a healthy democracy what the judiciary provides is a vouching or checking mechanism for the validity [of] laws that parliament has enacted or the appropriate international treaties to which we have subscribed," Kerr told the newspaper, adding that "The last thing we want is for government to have access to unbridled power."
Asserting that the UK parliament is "certainly sovereign," the former member of the UK's top bench argued that ministers could be left "irritated by legal challenges which may appear to them to be frivolous or misconceived" and the government "less than pleased when challenges are made to decisions they have taken frequently after very considerable deliberations."
"But it doesn't seem to me that attacking lawyers who provide the services that allow those challenges to be made ... is particularly profitable," Kerr said, pointing out that "When the government acts in excess of the powers [parliament] has decided, it's entirely healthy and entirely appropriate that there be some institution to point this out."
In September 2019, the UK Supreme Court ruled that Johnson's decision to prorogue parliament for five weeks at the height of the Brexit negotiations was unlawful.
Johnson's government has also faced criticism after a prominent minister told parliament that the country's Internal Market Bill violated international law by attempting to alter the terms of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, agreed before the UK left the EU this past January.
