RUTHFULLY YOURS

Illiberal and hypocritical — those few words capture the contortions of British judges who have ruled that the voices and votes of Brexit supporters need parliamentary endorsement. Consider the contradiction: those who would bow to Brussels also insist their own lawmakers are paramount.
The constitutional soap opera that is Brexit took on an interesting new plot line in November when the Queen’s bench division of the High Court for Justice heard the case of R Miller v The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. The panel of three judges found that the government did “not have power under the Crown’s prerogative to give notice pursuant to Article 50 of the Treaty of European Union for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union”.

The political and media reaction was predictable. The Independent described the decision as a “momentous defeat” for the May government. The Guardian thought it the most “encouraging day” for Remainers since the vote on June 23. Champagne socialist MP for the super-rich ghetto of Hampstead, Tulip Siddiq, tweeted that the decision was a vindication of “parliament’s sovereignty”, whilst Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg promised that parliament would amend “any legislation” before triggering Article 50. By contrast, the Sun wondered, “Who do EU think you are?” and the Daily Mail disparaged “gloating Europhiles” who hailed Theresa May’s “humiliation”, and condemned the “out of touch judges” as “enemies of the people”.

The decision by the three High Court judges, all of whom have significant ties to the European Court and judicial system, has added a surreal new act to the evolving political drama. It also creates an unanticipated impediment to Theresa May’s announcement, at the Conservative conference in October, of “a quiet revolution” that would make the United Kingdom a “sovereign and independent” country once again. Australians, of course, need no such revolution as they already enjoy the sovereignty and constitutional liberty bequeathed to them by what the nineteenth-century constitutional authority A.V. Dicey termed the “imperial mother of parliaments”.

What was the ground for the judges’ dramatic decision, which they asserted dealt “only with a pure question of law”, and does it make legal or constitutional sense? Interestingly, in rejecting the prerogative power of the Crown, the judges reaffirmed Dicey’s view that only parliament has “the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law … as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament”.

In order to establish the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, both Dicey and the High Court judges referred to the history of English common law and the great constitutional debates of the seventeenth century. In particular, alongside Dicey the judges cited the great oracle of the common law, Sir Edward Coke, who in his legal report on The Case of Proclamations (1610), ruled that “the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm”, because “the King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him”. This position was confirmed in the first two parts of section 1 of the Bill of Rights (1688), which stated “that the pretended power of suspending of laws or the execution of laws by regall authority without consent of Parlyament is illegall”.

BERLIN—A teenage girl who pledged allegiance to Islamic State was sentenced to six years in juvenile detention for stabbing and severely wounding a German police officer last February, ending the country’s first trial of an attacker accused of drawing inspiration from the militant group.

The 16-year-old girl, identified as Safia S., was found guilty of attempted murder, aggravated assault and supporting a foreign terrorist organization, the regional court in Celle that heard the case said.

Thursday’s sentence is substantially tougher than those handed down in recent terror-related trials, which have targeted unsuccessful plotters, members of designated terrorist organizations or people who had fought alongside such groups in Syria or Iraq before returning to Germany.

The trial of Safia S., who was 15 when she stabbed a federal policeman in the neck, was seen as a test of Germany’s ability to address the growing number of radicalized children and youth in its large Muslim community.

Juvenile law in Germany emphasizes the reintegration of youth offenders back into society and gives judges wide leeway in sentencing. While the sentence handed down to Safia S. was lengthy, it fell within the judge’s discretion, said Nikolaos Gazeas, a Cologne-based lawyer and expert on counterterrorism law.

Germany is still reeling from an attack in December by a Tunisian asylum seeker who rammed a stolen truck into a Berlin Christmas market, leaving 12 dead and scores wounded. Authorities have been under fire since it was disclosed that the perpetrator was a known extremist who had been on a security services’ watch list for months.

The court said chat logs found on the girl’s cellphone indicated that she carried out the stabbing in support of Islamic State, making it an act of terrorism. The trial, including the announcement of the guilty verdict and the sentence, took place behind closed doors because of the defendant’s young age.

Safia S.’s lawyer, Mutlu Günal, said he would appeal the verdict. He had argued in the girl’s defense that she had no intention of killing the policeman, didn’t have a terrorist motive and wasn’t in a position to measure the gravity of her act at the time she carried it out.

Safia S. was born and raised in Germany to a Moroccan mother and German father and has nationality in both countries.

Prosecutors argued during her trial that she had embraced the jihadist ideology of Islamic State by November 2015. But several security officials said the girl’s strict Muslim upbringing had certainly contributed to her radicalization. Videos disseminated on the internet, confirmed by authorities as authentic, show Safia S. at the age of 7, her head covered in a scarf, reciting the Quran with a well-known fundamentalist German preacher. CONTINUE AT SITE