Second, it hopes to obscure the difference between advice and adjudication. Iacobucci is not conducting a judicial inquiry, and has none of its powers. Yet he may give the appearance of doing so, and for one reason: because he once sat on the Supreme Court. He wasn’t just hired for his legal expertise. The government hopes to acquire the legitimacy of a Supreme Court ruling in support of its defiance of Parliament, without actually having to go to court to get one.
And they’re getting away with it! Rather than enforce its own resolution, the opposition has been busying itself with a new demand, that Iacobucci be asked to conduct a full-blown public inquiry into the Afghan detainees affair. But that is a diversion from the broader issue of responsibility to Parliament. More than that, it’s a confession of impotence: in any self-respecting Westminster democracy, Parliament has all the powers it needs to investigate such matters itself.
Well, perhaps that’s to be expected; it at least has the virtue of honesty. What I cannot understand is why Iacobucci would allow himself to be used in this way. He has placed himself in the middle of a nasty power struggle between the legislative and the executive branches, only not in the position of independent arbitrator, as on the court of which he was once a member, but as a paid adviser to one side. And he has potentially placed the existing members of the court, should it come to that, in the position of having to rule against one of their own. It is a surprising error of judgment.
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