Dear Mr Freeman

Bill of Rights

Thank you for your e-mail to the Ministry of Justice regarding the Bill of Rights. Your e-mail has been passed to my team to consider as we have responsibility for policy on constitutional matters.

The Bill of Rights is an important milestone in the growth of the powers and functions of Parliament and parts of it are still extant. Other parts of it have been repealed however, and the text of the Act still in force can be found at the statute law database, www.statutelaw.gov.uk.

Written documents such as the Bill of Rights 1689 and Magna Carta are important elements of our constitution. However the British Constitution is not, as it is in many countries, a `written constitution'. It is not codified in a single document but is made up of a complex web of statutes, conventions, and a corpus of common and other law. It is also informed by an interweaving of history and more modern democratic principles. The legal premise of the United Kingdom constitution - that the UK parliament is sovereign - is a fundamental part of our constitutional arrangements.

No Act of Parliament has supremacy over others, except to the extent that, in the event of inconsistency between provisions, the courts will give priority to those made most recently. No Parliament may be bound by a predecessor nor bind its successors. Parliament of course has to obey the law of the land, but it is open to Parliament to change it, by legislating on any matter on which it sees fit. It is not bound by any one Act, even the Bill of Rights or Magna Carta. It would, therefore, be open to this or a future Parliament to repeal or amend the Bill of Rights 1689, but I can assure you that this Government has no plans to do so.

Yours sincerely,

Sent electronically

Eirian Walsh Atkins

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