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The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative supremacy and thereby ultimate power over all other political bodies in the UK and the overseas territories. Parliament is bicameral but has three parts, consisting of the sovereign (King-in-Parliament), the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. In theory, power is officially vested in the King-in-Parliament. However, the Crown normally acts on the advice of the prime minister, and the powers of the House of Lords are limited to only delaying legislation; thus power is de facto vested in the House of Commons.
The Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 are two Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which form part of the constitution of the United Kingdom. Section 2(2) of the Parliament Act 1949 provides that the two Acts are to be construed as one.
The Parliament of Canada is the federal legislature of Canada, seated at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and is composed of three parts: the King, the Senate, and the House of Commons. By constitutional convention, the House of Commons is dominant, with the Senate rarely opposing its will. The Senate reviews legislation from a less partisan standpoint and may initiate certain bills. The monarch or his representative, normally the governor general, provides royal assent to make bills into law.
The Lok Sabha, constitutionally the House of the People, is the lower house of India's bicameral Parliament, with the upper house being the Rajya Sabha. Members of the Lok Sabha are elected by an adult universal suffrage and a first-past-the-post system to represent their respective constituencies, and they hold their seats for five years or until the body is dissolved by the President on the advice of the council of ministers. The house meets in the Lok Sabha Chambers of the Sansad Bhavan, New Delhi.
The New Zealand Parliament is the unicameral legislature of New Zealand, consisting of the King of New Zealand (King-in-Parliament) and the New Zealand House of Representatives. The King is usually represented by his governor-general. Before 1951, there was an upper chamber, the New Zealand Legislative Council. The New Zealand Parliament was established in 1854 and is one of the oldest continuously functioning legislatures in the world. It has met in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, since 1865.
Dissolution of a legislative assembly is the mandatory simultaneous resignation of all of its members, in anticipation that a successive legislative assembly will reconvene later with possibly different members. In a democracy, the new assembly is chosen by a general election. Dissolution is distinct on the one hand from abolition of the assembly, and on the other hand from its adjournment or prorogation, or the ending of a legislative session, any of which begins a period of inactivity after which it is anticipated that the same members will reassemble. For example, the "second session of the fifth parliament" could be followed by the "third session of the fifth parliament" after a prorogation, but the "first session of the sixth parliament" after a dissolution.
The National Assembly of Pakistan is the lower legislative house of the bicameral Parliament of Pakistan, which also comprises the Senate of Pakistan. The National Assembly and the Senate both convene at Parliament House in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. The National Assembly is a democratically elected body consisting of a total of 336 members who are referred to as Members of the National Assembly (MNAs), of which 266 are directly elected members and 70 reserved seats for women and religious minorities from all over the country. A political party or a coalition must secure 172 seats to obtain and preserve a majority.
The Parliament of the United Kingdom is dissolved automatically five years after the day on which it first met or earlier by the Sovereign by royal proclamation at the request of the Prime Minister. The prerogative power to dissolve Parliament was revived by the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022, which also repealed Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. By virtue of amendments made by the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act to Schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983, the dissolution of Parliament automatically triggers a general election for the next Parliament.
The Parliament of Singapore is the unicameral legislature of the Republic of Singapore, which governs the country alongside the president of Singapore. Largely based upon the Westminster system, the Parliament is made up of Members of Parliament (MPs) who are elected, as well as Non-constituency Members of Parliament (NCMPs) and Nominated Members of Parliament (NMPs) who are appointed. Following the 2020 general election, 93 MPs and two NCMPs were elected to the 14th Parliament. Nine NMPs will usually be appointed by the president.
The National Assembly is one of the two components of the Parliament of Guyana. Under Article 51 of the Constitution of Guyana, the Parliament of Guyana consists of the President and the National Assembly. The National Assembly has 65 members elected using the system of proportional representation. Twenty five are elected from the ten geographical constituencies and forty are awarded at the national level on the basis of block votes secured, using the LR-Hare Formula as prescribed by the elections Laws (Amendment) Act 15 of 2000.
The Parliament of Grenada is composed of the monarch and two chambers: Senate and the House of Representatives. It operates from the New Parliament Building in St. George's.
The National Assembly is Mauritius's unicameral legislature, which was called the Legislative Assembly until 1992, when the country became a republic. The Constitution of Mauritius provides for the parliament of Mauritius to consist of the President and the National Assembly. The parliament of Mauritius is modelled after the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, where members of parliament are voted in at regular general elections, on the basis of a first past the post system. The working language of the National Assembly is English.
A legislative session is the period of time in which a legislature, in both parliamentary and presidential systems, is convened for purpose of lawmaking, usually being one of two or more smaller divisions of the entire time between two elections. In each country the procedures for opening, ending, and in between sessions differs slightly. A session may last for the full term of the legislature or the term may consist of a number of sessions. These may be of fixed duration, such as a year, or may be used as a parliamentary procedural device. A session of the legislature is brought to an end by an official act of prorogation. In either event, the effect of prorogation is generally the clearing of all outstanding matters before the legislature.
In the United Kingdom, confidence motions are a means of testing the support of the government (executive) in a legislative body, and for the legislature to remove the government from office. A confidence motion may take the form of either a vote of confidence, usually put forward by the government, or a vote of no confidence, usually proposed by the opposition. When such a motion is put to a vote in the legislature, if a vote of confidence is defeated, or a vote of no confidence is passed, then the incumbent government must resign, or call a general election.
Prorogation is the end of a parliamentary session in the Parliament of Canada and the parliaments of its provinces and territories. It differs from a recess or adjournment, which do not end a session; and differs from a complete dissolution of parliament, which ends both the session and the entire parliament, requiring an election for the House of Commons in the bicameral federal parliament and the singular legislative chamber of the unicameral provincial parliaments.
The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 (FTPA) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that for the first time set in legislation a default fixed election date for a general election to the Westminster parliament. It remained in force until 2022, when it was repealed. Since then, as before its passage, elections are required by law to be held at least once every five years, but can be called earlier if the prime minister advises the monarch to exercise the royal prerogative to do so. Prime ministers have often employed this mechanism to call an election before the end of their five-year term, sometimes fairly early in it, and critics saw this as giving an unfair advantage to the incumbent prime minister. While it was in force, the FTPA removed this longstanding power of the prime minister.
Section 5 of the Constitution of Australia empowers the Governor-General of Australia to prorogue the Australian Parliament, thereby bringing the current legislative session to an end. Prorogation clears all business pending before Parliament and allows the Houses to be called back on a particular date without triggering an election. The date for the new session of Parliament may be specified either in the proroguing proclamation or when the Governor-General summons the Houses to meet again.
In United Kingdom constitutional law, prorogation is an act usually used to mark the end of a parliamentary session. Part of the royal prerogative, it is the name given to the period between the end of a session of the UK Parliament and the State Opening of Parliament that begins the next session. The average length of prorogation since 2000 is approximately 18 days. The parliamentary session may also be prorogued before Parliament is dissolved. The power to prorogue Parliament belongs to the monarch, on the advice of the Privy Council. Like all prerogative powers, it is not left to the personal discretion of the monarch but is to be exercised, on the advice of the prime minister, according to law.
On 28 August 2019, the Parliament of the United Kingdom was ordered to be prorogued by Queen Elizabeth II upon the advice of the Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson, advice later ruled to be unlawful. The prorogation, or suspension, of Parliament was to be effective from between 9 and 12 September 2019 and last until the State Opening of Parliament on 14 October 2019; in the event, Parliament was suspended between 10 September and 24 September. Since Parliament was to be prorogued for five weeks and reconvene just 17 days before the United Kingdom's scheduled departure from the European Union on 31 October 2019, the move was seen by many opposition politicians and political commentators as a controversial and unconstitutional attempt by the prime minister to avoid parliamentary scrutiny of the Government's Brexit plans in those final weeks leading up to Brexit. Johnson and his Government defended the prorogation of Parliament as a routine political process that ordinarily follows the selection of a new prime minister and would allow the Government to refocus on a legislative agenda.
R (Miller) v The Prime Minister and Cherry v Advocate General for Scotland, also known as Miller II and Miller/Cherry, were joint landmark constitutional law cases on the limits of the power of royal prerogative to prorogue the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Argued before the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in September 2019, the case concerned whether the advice given by the prime minister, Boris Johnson, to Queen Elizabeth II that Parliament should be prorogued in the prelude to the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union was lawful.
References
- General Election timetable 2010
- Wash-Up: Bills Receiving Royal Assent, 1987–2005, House of Lords Library Note LLN 2010/011, 30 March 2010
- Election Timetables, House of Commons Library Research Paper 09/44, 13 May 2009
- Parliament's wash-up's a stitch, Martin Bell, The Guardian, 28 March 2010