Judicial review against prorogation of Parliament launched

28 August 2019 by Jonathan Metzer

The day began with the news that the Prime Minister Boris Johnson had asked the Queen to prorogue (suspend) Parliament in order to table a Queen’s Speech — with the effect that the number of days that MPs would sit between now and Brexit Day on Halloween being significantly reduced.

Tonight, Gina Miller, the successful claimant in the case challenging Theresa May’s attempt to trigger Article 50 and begin the process of leaving the EU without a vote in Parliament, announced that she has reassembled the same legal team and launched a legal challenge to this move.

On Newsnight (see 31 mins, 20 seconds into this episode), former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption said that whilst he considered what Boris Johnson has done to be politically “shocking”, he did not expect the courts to block the move, saying that

I think that it’s a very very long shot. This is such an unusual situation that nobody can stand here and say what the answer is definitely going to be, but there are huge difficulties in the way of an application like that … the relations between the Crown and Parliament are governed by conventions … [which are] binding only in the sense that it would be politically costly to disregard them … the courts are not there to decide what are good political reasons and what are bad political reasons, they are there to decide what’s lawful.

We shall have to wait to see what happens next.