The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses the origins and growth of judicial review in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Judicial review in the United Kingdom under the Human Rights Act is best explained by borrowing from the United States, Canada, Germany, and the European Court of Human Rights. The emergence of judicial review in the United Kingdom also coincided with the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, thus creating a need for a federalism umpire. This was vividly illustrated by a recent U.K. Supreme Court separation of powers umpiring opinion; and by a 2019 umpiring ruling, which upheld Scotland’s highest court, while overturning an English and Welsh court on the justiciability and breadth of The Queen’s power to prorogue Parliament. The adoption by the United Kingdom of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), as a judicially enforced Bill of Rights, was done, in part, out of embarrassment that the United Kingdom kept losing so many human rights cases when they were heard by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). There is, accordingly, a mild rights from wrongs story that explains the adoption of the Human Rights Act of 1998, although a desire to borrow that which was fashionable and in style provides the major explanation for the adoption of this act.