The UK Human Rights blog from 1 Crown Office Row is an excellent resource for lawyers and non-lawyers…Rosalind English has shed a bit more light on the Woolas case and has come up with some serious ‘food for thought’.
I wrote about this last week…. and I am more than happy to do some more thinking after reading…..
I have just read a column by John Rentoul in today’s Independent on this, and there was a comment by Dan Hodges on yesterday’s Guardian website. Both of these seemed to ignore how the law works and seemed to amount to special pleading for the individual concerned.
Now I am not a lawyer but it seems evident that electoral conduct is governed by the Representation of the Peoples Act and as such if there is a complaint about illegal practices it is down to the Court as constituted in accordance with the Act to determine whether this is the case or not.
If it is, the sanction is that the election is declared void and an automatic disqualification for three years will follow on the person found guilty.
Judicial review has been refused as the decision is from the High Court in the first place (Matthew Taylor deals with this in more detail and with much more thought in his reply on the UK Human Rights blog.)
There is in any event an opportunity to appeal to the Court of Appeal on a question of law, but presumably not one of fact.
I am quite happy, and would be pleased, to stand corrected on this interpretation by any lawyers (or anyone else for that matter) but the issue is a question of statute law which we may not like but that is what it is.