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Boscawen appeal fails
By Steven | February 17, 2009
The Court of Appeal has thrown out the Bill of Rights challenge to the Electoral Finance Act. That’s not to say that they thought the EFA was consistent with the BORA. Just that they wouldn’t consider the issue.
I’m not too surprised that they threw out the challenge to the Attorney-General’s decision not to report to Parliament that the bill appeared to be inconsistent with the BORA. I didn’t think that the courts would want to wade into something so closely associated with the proceedings of Parliament.
But the Court of Appeal also whiffed on the second, more interesting and important point: do the courts have power to issue declarations of inconsistency with the legislation itself? The Court of Appeal leaves the question open (but suggests the answer will be no). Why didn’t it even address the question? Because:
Our earlier conclusions make it unnecessary to deal with the issues relating to declarations of inconsistency…. because of our views on the non-justiciability of the s. 7 obligation, there is no need to make a decision on this aspect of the case…
I don’t understand this. The earlier conclusions were about the Attorney-General’s report to Parliament. They were mostly about the reasons the courts shouldn’t mess with that process. But once the Bill is law, the ballgame is different. The question of declarations of inconsistency is a separate question, and it’s not self-evident that the answer to one determines the answer to the other.
Anyway, the flavour of the judgment is that the courts will be reluctant to address “abstract” issues (ie BORA questions that don’t arise in the course of a separate dispute). They even leave to another day whether a declaration will be available as a remedy in separate-dispute cases. I’m inclined to think this is a shame.
Topics: Electoral speech, General, NZ Bill of Rights Act | Comments Off on Boscawen appeal fails