UK intervention in Sark would not be justified
I very much enjoyed, as I always do, reading Richard Digard’s latest column in which he makes some important observations about the dangers of the Crown intervening in a Crown Dependency on good governance grounds. If I may add some opinions of my own. The MoJ’s three stated criteria are not authoritative: what makes an intervention justified (if, indeed, anything) will be decided authoritatively by the courts, if it ever comes to that, which hopefully, it won’t. Hopefully this will provide at least some deterrent to intervention.
It seems to me that the current UK Supreme Court is also not entirely devoid of pink, so may be inclined to follow a UK Government of the same persuasion.
The Supreme Court ruled that the advice given to Her Majesty to grant Royal Assent to the Reform (Sark) 2008 Law was unlawful and that it therefore had the power to quash the law – but it refused to quash it. Therefore, whether any intervention is lawful and justified or not may also turn out in practice retrospectively to be moot.
Finally, in my opinion, Sark’s current problems (at least the biggest ones) stem from the 2008 constitutional reform law, which was also the result of UK government intervention (or a threat thereof, depending on your point of view). They were all foreseeable, and foreseen. And it will get worse – inevitably. I am not convinced that Sark needs (or can survive) having a big civil service, or indeed that any future UK intervention would be any more successful than the 2008 one was. Perhaps Sark would be better off going back to the way it was before 2008, when I believe it was a much more democratic and successful place than it is today. It also had sufficient capacity and access to the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to govern effectively (The Tenants) which it lost through the 2008 law and now doesn’t have. A small jurisdiction can have democracy, it just cannot reflect in every way the sort of system that’s suitable for a large country. Even the ECHR recognises this in Article 63: ‘The provisions of this Convention shall be applied in such territories with due regard, however, to local requirements.’ Moreover, all the attempts to betray the will of 17.4m. people makes me wonder if the UK itself is really still a democracy and can claim any sort of moral high ground.
DR TOMAŽ SLIVNIK