Judicial Review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Judicial Review - Essay Example Who will then protect the ordinary citizen from suffering from the wrath of the angry Queen of Hearts and give them a chance to have their cases reconsidered and to achieve procedural and substantive justice Our saviour is of course the remedy of Judicial Review which has become more of an eye sore to the Executive in the yester decades as the Judiciary continues to "check and balance" an unruly, highly political executive particularly after the new Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and the not so recent Human Rights Act 1998 which seems to have absorbed in the veins of judicial activism and recent case law with much ease. This Paper explores the process of judicial review of administrative action in the United Kingdom in the context of its constitutional significance. ... migration and Terrorism law post 9/11 and 7/7).Although there have been attempts to circumvent the scope and effect of the doctrine of Judicial Review in the past ( Anisminic Ltd. v. Foreign Compensation Commission2) ,the most recent has been the notorious "ouster" clause in the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Bill which has provoked an outcry from the human rights lobby and the constitutional law experts. Also significant is the role of the Human Rights Act 1998 which has to some extent resolved the debate whether judicial review should be based on common law or statute.3 Power must be Checked by Power4 The constitutional basis of Judicial review lies in the concept of "checks and balances" where as the actions of the members of the executive will be "checked" by the Judiciary to see whether they have gone beyond their "power" to prevent the arbitrary abuse of power. Traditionally the English approach to a systematisation of judicial review was remedial based and thus similar to the development of the prerogative writs5 which developed as personal requests by an individual to the King for the redressal of a wrong suffered by another individual.6The UK has no separate system of administrative courts (and the concept never found favour with the system either eversince the abolition of infamous prerogative Star Chamber).Thus the present administrative review system of England can be described as a body that combines both a substantive body of law containing grounds of review and a large number of administrative tribunals dealing with statutory appeals from decisions of public bodies. The subject of judicial review of administrative action thus requires a discussion of the role of the courts in devising and applying constraints to the exercise of