Committee for Privileges and Conduct
The Committee for Privileges and Conduct is a committee of the British House of Lords .
tasks
The members of the House of Lords have, in addition to their legislative duties, certain rights. In order to establish and defend these rights in general and in individual cases, the House of Lords has set up a committee known as the Committee for Privileges.
In addition to the general safeguarding of the rights and privileges of the upper house members, e.g. B. Immunity, one of the main tasks is to determine who is entitled to a seat in the House of Lords in case of doubt. This task, namely to determine who can claim a seat in the House of Lords , was particularly important before the general abolition of hereditary rights for the old hereditary nobility (Dukes, Marquesses, Earls, Viscounts and Barons), which took place in the House of Lords Act 1999 Significance because the succession was often unclear in a peerage and several candidates claimed a title.
Such a case mainly occurred when a long-standing barony was claimed by one or more petitioners. In these cases it was mostly about the petitioned restoration of a so-called barony by writ . Most of these baronies came from the High Middle Ages. During this period and up to the early modern period, hereditary English baronies were not created through letters of nobility (by letters patent ), but rather through a request from the king to appear in parliament as advisor to the crown and to take part in the deliberations of this body. This call, called Writ of Summons , established a hereditary barony that was passed on to the eldest son. In contrast to the hereditary baronies created later by nobility letters, which could only be inherited to male heirs, a barony by writ was also inherited to female descendants if there were no male heirs. However, since only one person could bear the title at a time, and the female heirs did not inherit according to the principle of primogeneity applicable to men , but inherited the entire hand, such a barony was inactive if several women with equal rights were the heirs, until either only one female Person was left or if one of the descendants of the last title holder entitled to inherit successfully petitioned the dormant title with the crown. This state of rest is called Abeyance .
Procedure
If the crown received a petition to restore a dormant barony, the crown had two options: In the case of obvious claims that were not disputed by anyone, the crown could, after consulting the attorney general, grant the claim and end the suspension. As a rule, however, the Crown referred the petition to the Committee for Privileges, with the request that the petitioner's entitlement to be verified. The committee then examines the claim made and prepares an expert opinion for the crown in which it recommends that the petitioner or one of the petitioners accept or reject the claim.
Since 1927 the committee has had the right to refuse the petition itself if the claimed barony has been an abeyant for more than 100 years or if, if there are several beneficiaries, the petitioner is less than a third co-heir. This regulation was preceded by the fact that in 1923 the Barony Cromwell was restituted after an Abeyance of 426 years and the Barony Fitzwalter, which had been inactive since 1756, was not restored until 1924. However, the granting of this possibility to the Committee for Privileges was an optional provision that it did not always make use of, because in 1989 the Barony Gray of Codnor , which had been inactive since 1496, was restituted.
An additional extension of the decision-making authority of the committee came into force in 1954: on the occasion of the given occasion, the committee denied the right to common heirs to claim only one title at a time, although the last title holder had held several baronies, so from one title holder with several titles now several Title holder with only one title each to make.
With the reform of the upper house of 1999, which basically abolished the hereditary upper house seats and only allowed a selection of 75 from among those originally entitled, the resurrection of titles that had been dormant for a long time did not become obsolete, since when one of the selected, formerly with hereditary rights, was seated upon death Members of the House of Lords for the seat that has become vacant can of course also be re-elected from among the originally hereditary peers, a holder of a title holder who has returned from the offense.
Composition of the committee
The Committee for Privileges has 16 members elected by the House of Lords. By 2009, at least three of them had to be Lords of Appeal in Ordinary . With the abolition of the legal functions of the House of Lords by law of 2005, the legal assessors ceased to exist. This only applies today when a decision is made as to whether peer dignity should be awarded.