The English High Court's judgment in the article 50 litigation
was read out and handed down this morning. If your can't get it on
the Judicial website; a pdf can be found here.
Be very careful on the use of the term "common ground" in this
judgment. That is no more than a means deployed before the Court of
avoiding addressing issues that might have sunk the entire
arguments on both sides, the Claimants and the Governments.
Certain of those grounds are no more than sinkholes in the wider
context of what both Parliament and the Government might be ale to
do in the wider context of the duties restrictions and
responsibilities owed to the Crown Dependencies and Overseas
Territories in this context, if not in other areas.
Comment to follow soon on issues concerning the Crown
Dependencies and the United Kingdom's associated territories .....
. Note as a matter of principle that although ECA 1972 mentions the
Crown Dependencies at s.2. (6) it is only to avoid repugnancy,
within the United Kingdom between a UK Act of Parliament, and
any Legislation passed in the CDs expressed to implement an EC
obligation. That was to protect what has become the internal market
within the United Kingdom and in its relationship with the European
whole.
In reaction to the Northern Ireland proceedings on a similar
issue, the High Court stated clearly that the Irish judge should
have started analysis from what it considered the appropriate
starting point namely 104 (1) " .... the effect of the ECA 1972 on
domestic law and the Crown's prerogative powers". "
Suffice it to say for the moment that the United Kingdom
Parliament cannot legislate and in any sense "negotiate" for the
Crown Dependencies without their assent.
Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, the Duchy of Normandy started its
invasion of England, Wales and then Ireland in 1066, the De
Carteret family settled now at Saint Ouen was on the rôle - and you
did not have a legal system or a common law of your own at the
time. The previous invasions of the Anglo-Saxons removed any prior
remnants of British law known to Alfred or the Venerable Bede. The
privilege accorded and afterwards confirmed by John I (Sansterre)
was to retain our own laws and customs. The Norman then British
crown was no more than a feudal owner of land in the Islands
amongst others. Dependency does not mean a form of addiction to
overbearing interpretation - it is like, the crowns en
droit concerned, "Peculiar" in the true constitutional sense
of the term.