Today marks the establishment of the House of Lords International Agreements Committee as a freestanding Committee of Parliament. So here is a thread on treaty scrutiny in the House of Lords to celebrate the occasion 1/16/

Parliament has never been very good at scrutinising treaties. Bagehot noted the problem in 1872 in the second edition of his seminal work The English Constitution 2/16

I suspect the reasons for this are twofold: first the fact the negotiations of treaties are the responsibility of the Executive under the royal prerogative... 3/16

And second the UK’s dualist legal system - which means that international agreements do not take effect in domestic law until they have been enacted in domestic legislation. 4/16

This sounds like a safeguard. But in fact agreements tend to be signed before any legislation (if it is necessary) is brought before Parliament. So Parliamentarians are left with a rather binary choice... 5/16