Share it

On appeal from: [2010] EWCA Crim 2437

Concerns the question whether the power to create criminal offences by order, granted by the United Nations Act 1946, s 1, may only lawfully be exercised at or about the time of the relevant resolution by the UNSC, which such order is implementing. As a preliminary issue, the appellants sought to establish that the Order creating the offence of making funds available to Iraq was ultra vires s 1 of the 1946 Act. Held: the power conferred by s 1 cannot be restricted by confining its exercise within an artificially restricted timeframe. Had Parliament intended to confine the order-making power to urgent use, one would have expected it to be clearly provided for in the 1946 Act. Instead, the Act is entirely silent on the question and indeed provides for a power to vary the existing order without placing any time limitations upon this power of variation. The history of how the Order in the present case came to be made so long after the UN resolution it was implementing confirms that it would be inappropriate to limit the exercise of the power conferred by the 1946 Act within a restricted timeframe by demonstrating that Security Council resolutions are not simply one-off measures requiring immediate implementation by member states which then recede into history:

For judgment, please download: [2011] UKSC 9
For the Court’s press summary, please download: Press Summary
For a non-PDF version of the judgment, please visit: BAILII