Activist’ EU judges extend the law beyond the intentions and reach of elected representatives.
Have you ever heard that or thought it yourself? Fed up with beauty-parade elections, have you sometimes wished to leave governing to the experts?
Well, this is what we have already with the EU – only it isn’t benign because the ‘experts’ who appointed themselves to look after us have made serious mistakes which they won’t recognise and we can’t change (the EU was designed to have no reverse gear).
Lord Sumption, a judge of the UK Supreme Court, gave a speech in 2013 that beautifully explains the benefit of parliamentary law over expert, judge-made law. He concludes that the latter is how democracy dies – largely unnoticed:
“They are slowly drained of what makes them democratic, by a gradual process of internal decay and mounting indifference, until one suddenly notices that they have become something different, like the republican constitutions of Athens or Rome or the Italian city-states of the Renaissance.”
It is not possible to do justice to his argument in a summary so we urge those who still believe that elections to the EU Parliament prove that the EU is democratic to read him themselves:
The EU’s parliament does not make law, it may be elected but it is empty of authority.
We are subject to three types of court: the UK’s, the EU’s and the ECHR’s. In the first judges interpret Parliament’s laws, taking real cases and making them general (through precedent). These laws can be changed by popular agreement, which has the benefit of making them popularly accepted rather than imposed.
In both the other courts judges are encouraged to be active, thereby extending the law’s reach beyond what was known, envisaged or intended when laws were drafted.
This EU Won't Work 