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Francis Hoar Profile picture
@Francis_Hoar
Jul 10 • 12 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
Hermer betrays a lack of understanding about the constitution & how it ensures democratic accountability: of Ministers to Parliament & of Parliament to the people.
Compliance with international obligations is a matter for Ministers alone. The AG advises them-directly. No more. 🧵 Image
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(Link below: )

International *obligations* are obligations on states. It is for a state - here, the Crown acting through Ministers - to decide how it complies with its international obligations, accepting the *international* consequences if it does not.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/…
And that can and may often include *whether* to comply with those obligations.

International obligations have no impact on domestic law for good reason. Only Parliament in its fullest sense - as a legislator - can make domestic law directly.
That includes not only through primary legislation (Acts) but where it authorises Ministers to do so through secondary legislation (statutory instruments, etc), over which it retains control through the veto of both Houses.
So if Parliament incorporates international ‘law’ into domestic law - through primary or secondary legislation - Ministers have a legal obligation in domestic law to comply. That used to include EU law.
But if it does not, they do not.
It is for the Crown to decide, exercising its executive power, whether and in what way to follow obligations on it, exercising the state’s sovereign authority. And that authority is now exercised by Ministers in an indirectly elected government…
… accountable to a directly elected Parliament.
For Hermer and others (including Cabinet Secretaries going well above their legitimate authority) to claim that compliance with international law is part of the ‘rule of law’ is simply wrong in a dualist legal system - one where international law is not incorporated…
…unless Parliament (directly or indirectly through secondary legislation) actively decides to make it part of domestic law.
Indeed, it is almost the reverse of the truth for it subverts the sovereignty of the Crown (acting executively) and the Crown in Parliament (acting legislatively). And that is a direct affront to our form of representative democracy.
None of this is to say that it is not desirable for governments to follow their international obligations.Ours does almost (albeit not entirely) invariably.But whether a state does so is for that state to decide. That is the very meaning of sovereignty on the international plane.
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More from @Francis_Hoar

Francis Hoar Profile picture
Feb 9
Not quite. The key problems are the Terms of Reference, the failure to grant core participant status to any group challenging lockdowns and of the chair and counsel to scrutinise the evidence.
Lawyers aren’t purporting to be experts. They just aren’t asking the right questions.
And that they aren’t is in large part (although not only) because of the Terms of Reference and the lack of an adversarial process through cross-examination of experts by participants with different perspectives.
With vanishingly few exceptions, the only difference in perspective allowed has been between ‘lockdown’ and ‘lockdown earlier and harder’.
Read 10 tweets
Francis Hoar Profile picture
Jan 20
This is not only reasonable but contemplated by the H. Rts Act, where legsl’n interferes with Conv’n rights in the opinion of domestic cts or Strasbourg. The courts can only make a declaration of incompatibility where the law cannot be constructed compatibly with Conv’n rights.
And, while there is a duty to construct legislation compatibly with Convention rights (as considered to apply by domestic courts or Strasbourg jurisprudence) where it is possible to do so, Parliament can then legislate so that it is impossible for the courts to do anything but follow their direction, even if incompatible with the courts’ jurisprudence on Convention rights.
This was the formulation Derry Irvine and others created in the HRA 1998, preserving Parliamentary sovereignty and allowing a creative tension between Parliament, Strasbourg and the domestic courts. The idea of human rights ‘coming home’ was not to cut Parliament out but to entrench it as part of the process.
Read 9 tweets
Francis Hoar Profile picture
Apr 16, 2024
The government’s tobacco Bill is not just stunningly impractical and unjustified by the harm that smoking causes to society, rather than the individual. It is sinister. To require adults to prove their age (not that they have reached adulthood) to buy a legal product is a gross intrusion in to individual privacy and autonomy.
It has preposterous results, such as the two 25 year-olds (then 35, 45…), a day apart in age, one of whom will commit a *criminal offence* by buying a product available to the other. (Again, not comparable to an age limit based on an assessment of maturity that is reached, only once, by all.)
It would create a thoroughly dangerous precedent that the state may ban a product not because of its capacity to do immediate grave harm (eg poisons) or to cause disorder or other societal mischief (eg alcohol, if we were being honest) but because of long-term health risks.
Read 11 tweets
Francis Hoar Profile picture
Jun 28, 2023
I acted in a judicial review of this decsn in 2021. Regardless of whether the court rightly rejected the challenge to the decision of the Sec of State, as a matter of record the JCVI did not recommend vaccination for 11-15s as there was insufficient evidence about their safety.
The reason why the Chief Medical Officers of the UK and devolved nations (‘the CMOs’) recommended overruling them was astonishingly flimsy - that they might save a (proportionately) tiny number of school days in absences by reducing the number of children getting Covid.
In making that decision, the CMOs *expressly* decides not to measure that against the accepted certainty of absences due to side-effects of the vaccine. Even only taking into account minor side effects (cold like symptoms) these were likely to be greater than absences from Covid.
Read 5 tweets
Francis Hoar Profile picture
Jun 13, 2023
An improvement on indications of Lady Hallett’s thinking,but it misses central points.
Lockdowns weren’t considered in pandemic plans not just b’cs they were unthinkable but bc’s measures *less* draconian were found to be ineffective & disproportionate.

bbc.co.uk/news/health-65…
It *is* positive that the Inquiry is finally addressing the lack of any adequate prior consideration of the exceptional harm that wld be the inevitable consequence of lockdown; let alone to weigh whether that harm was justified by the supposed efficacy of lockdown.
(I say finally because of the consummate lack of any such consideration in the terms of reference and earlier openings.)
Read 9 tweets
Francis Hoar Profile picture
Aug 2, 2022
I find the approach of Christian Concern very odd - and wholly divorced from orthodox Augustinian and Aquinan Christian principles, quite apart from Hippocratic ones. Tragic though this case is, it concerns the end of life supporting treatment, not active steps to kill.
Not long ago, such withdrawal would have been expected and uncontroversial, however sad, where medical professionals determined that it was very unlikely that a person would awake from a coma.
And, because it was treatment using facilities and medication that was finite, such a determination was likely to have been final, a hospital having the right to ration treatment.
Read 18 tweets

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