filamentosmovimentos

"Philip Allott (professor emeritus of international public law at Cambridge University, and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge): there are good reasons to believe the government’s decision to withdraw from the EU would not be legal."
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"The principle of the rule of law has become a fundamental principle of our constitution and of liberal democracy in general. All public power is subject to the law applied and enforced by the regular courts. Until 2015, the lord chancellor, as head of the judiciary, was the ultimate guardian of the rule of law. Then a lord chancellor was appointed who was not a judge but a government minister."
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"it is worth noting that it would be a challenge not to the Referendum Act of Parliament – challenging the validity of an act of parliament would raise formidable problems of general constitutional law – but to the actions of the government in the process leading up to that legislation."
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"Article 50 explicitly leaves the legality of a withdrawal decision to national law. An unlawful decision under UK law would be invalid for the purposes of article 50."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/30/politics-brexit-unlawful-eu-uk




"Unlike most modern states, Britain does not have a codified constitution but an unwritten one formed of Acts of Parliament, court judgments and conventions. (...) For most people, especially abroad, the United Kingdom does not have a constitution at all in the sense most commonly used around the world — a document of fundamental importance setting out the structure of government and its relationship with its citizens."

"There are a number of associated characteristics of Britain’s unwritten constitution, a cardinal one being that in law Parliament is sovereign in the sense of being the supreme legislative body. Since there is no documentary constitution containing laws that are fundamental in status and superior to ordinary Acts of Parliament, the courts may only interpret parliamentary statutes. They may not overrule or declare them invalid for being contrary to the constitution and ‘unconstitutional’. So, too, there are no entrenched procedures (such as a special power of the House of Lords, or the requirement of a referendum) by which the unwritten constitution may be amended. The legislative process by which a constitutional law is repealed, amended or enacted, even one dealing with a matter of fundamental political importance, is similar in kind to any other Act of Parliament."

http://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/articles/britains-unwritten-constitution