In October 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty, Philip Alston, made the following statement: “citizens are becoming ever more visible to their governments, but not the other way around.” Federica Donati set out to analyze the Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) from 2010 to 2020 because it is deemed to be a way of subjecting…
On 9 and 12 September John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, gave two extremely important speeches in terms of promotion and defence of the rule of law and parliamentary democracy. Anybody attaching great value to those issues will hardly remain deaf to the words spoken by Mr. Speaker. The first speech is the one in which he announced…
In the wake of the beginning of the trial in the Spanish Supreme Court against twelve Catalan independence leaders, Hywel Williams MP asked the Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow whether it would be in order to have a democratic debate in the House on a similar matter, namely Welsh independence, without the prospect of being prosecuted by…
Tuesday 4 December the House of Commons voted in favour of a “contempt motion” for the Government May’s failure to publish the legal advice by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox concerning the EU Withdrawal Agreement. With 311 votes in favor and 293 against, the British MPs approved a motion finding Ministers in contempt and establishing the immediate publication of the full…
“We had no instructions” senior Tory MP and former Justice Minister Ken Clarke said on Wednesday, November 15, in a debate on Brexit on the floor of the House of Commons. The British public was not the only one left in the dark. Even MPs had no instructions, given that a proper debate over the options and the consequences of the United…
On 15 March 2017 the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) of the House of Commons issued a report containing a clear warning: “[…] the Cabinet Secretary does not have any formal recourse to object to a Prime Minister’s chosen course of action in the event that the Prime Minister of the day wishes to disregard the procedures for…