Bill of Rights (England)
The Bill of Rights ( German bill of rights ) from 1689 regulates the rights of the English parliament vis-à-vis royalty and is considered one of the fundamental documents of parliamentarism . The law was passed by Parliament on December 16, 1689. Due to the high rank of the Bill of Rights , the legal term bill no longer has the lesser meaning of "draft law"; rather, it was also used in the USA for a fundamental piece of legislation.
background
The law, of Upper and Lower House on 13 February 1689 initially as a Declaration of Rights ( Statement of Rights adopted), was born on 23 October of that year of the new royal couple William III. recognized by Orange and Mary II . The confirmation as Bill of Rights by Wilhelm III. and Mary II, who only came to the English throne in the spring through the Glorious Revolution , marked the end of a decade-long dispute between the monarchy and parliament, in which the latter largely asserted its interests.
The development to the Bill of Rights had its origin in the conflict of the parliament with King Charles I. After the lower house had seen his rights violated several times by Charles I, it submitted the Petition of Right to him in 1628 , the request for justice , the essential one Anticipated points of the later Bill of Rights . After a decade of sole rule by Charles I, the House of Commons passed the Grand Remonstrance in 1641 , a letter of appeal to the king in which the demand for parliamentary control of the executive was voiced for the first time. The dispute over remonstrance was one of the precipitating factors in the English Civil War , which began in 1642 and ended in 1649 with the public execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Republic.
After the monarchy was restored under Charles II in 1660 , there were renewed conflicts between the king and parliamentarians. In the Exclusion Crisis (1678–1681), for example, the Whigs attempted to exclude the Catholic brother of Charles II, later James II , from the line of succession because of his denomination. After 1685, under Jacob's reign, the conflict flared up again in all sharpness. Like earlier monarchs of the House of Stuart, he believed in the divine right of kings. The resulting dispute with Parliament led to the Glorious Revolution in 1688, in which Jacob was expelled and his Protestant son-in-law William of Orange was appointed to the English throne. The Declaration of Rights was a direct reaction to the violations of law and absolutist aspirations of which James II was guilty in the eyes of Parliament. In essence, his dispute with the Stuart kings was about the question of whether the monarch ruled solely by divine law and was thus above the law or whether he was an official subject to the law due to the English constitutional development since the Magna Carta .
content
According to the Bill of Rights , the king had to convene parliament at regular intervals and required its approval for the collection of taxes and duties, the use of torture and the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime. In addition, the law established the immunity of the members of parliament: They enjoyed complete freedom of speech in the lower house and in future only had to answer for offenses before the latter, but no longer before the king or his courts.
The Bill of Rights strengthened Parliament's rights vis-à-vis the monarch, but contained only two civil rights: petitions and gun ownership . "By causing several good subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when papists were both armed and employed contrary to law". The right to gun ownership came under pressure from the Whigs. The experiences under the Stuarts had shown them how vulnerable English freedom was to a disarmed citizenry.
meaning
The Bill of Rights strengthened the parliament's rights vis-à-vis the monarch and was a milestone on the way to an enlightened and parliamentary state. The development towards a parliament began early in England, but monarchs had repeatedly tried to regain their absolute position. Not infrequently, such disputes had led to military confrontations that claimed many victims. The Bill of Rights was intended to avoid such conflicts in the future, because the roles of monarch and MP were now clearly defined. The absolute power of the king had been curtailed in favor of parliament and was now subject to certain rules. By and large, the Bill of Rights forms the basis for later constitutional systems. For example, it was the model for the French Declaration of Human and Civil Rights of 1789 or the Constitution of the United States of 1787 and its first ten amendments . The long European constitutional tradition has its origins in England, where enlightened and progressive ideas were incorporated into politics very early on.
See also
literature
- Beddard, Robert (Ed.): The revolutions of 1688 . Oxford 1991, ISBN 978-0-19-822920-9 .
- Claydon, Tony: William III and the godly revolution . Cambridge 1996, ISBN 978-0-521-47329-3 .
- Cruickshanks, Eveline: The glorious revolution . Basingstoke 2000, ISBN 978-0-312-23008-1 .
- Dillon, Patrick: The last revolution: 1688 and the creation of the modern world . London 2007, ISBN 978-0-224-07195-6 .
- Harris, Tim: Revolution: the great crisis of the British monarchy, 1685-1720 . London 2007, ISBN 978-0-14-101652-8 .
- Jarrells, Anthony S .: Britain's bloodless revolutions: 1688 and the romantic reform of literature . Houndmills 2005, ISBN 978-1-4039-4107-7 .
- Jones, JR: The revolution of 1688 in England . London 1972, ISBN 978-0-297-99467-1 .
- Pincus, Steve: 1688: The first modern revolution . New Haven 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-11547-5 .
- Schwoerer, Lois G. (Ed.): The revolution of 1688 - 1689: changing perspectives . Cambridge 1992, ISBN 978-0-521-39321-8 .
- Stasavage, David: Public debt and the birth of the democratic state: France and Great Britain, 1688-1789 . Cambridge 2003, ISBN 978-0-521-80967-2 .
Web links
- Text of the Bill of Rights at the Avalon Project (English)
- Text of the Bill of Rights in Verfassungs.Eu (German)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Library of Original Sources: Volume VII: Era of Revolution . In: Oliver J. Thatcher (Ed.): The Library Of Original Sources . tape 7 . The Minerva Group, Inc., 2004, ISBN 1-4102-1407-9 , pp. 10 (English, 456 pages, limited preview in Google Book Search).
- ^ Text from the Bill of Rights Yale Law School - accessed September 29, 2013
- ^ All the Way Down the Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties in America D. Kopel, J. Olson, Hamline Law Review, Vol. 22, 1998-1999