This chapter explores the role of the legislature in the collaborative constitutional scheme. It argues that the central role of the legislature is to scrutinise, check, and deliberate on policy proposals put forward by the Executive. The Executive proposes, whilst the legislature deliberates and disposes. Drilling down into the detail of legislative engagement with rights in the Westminster Parliament, this chapter showcases the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) as a key site for parliamentary deliberation and scrutiny on matters of rights. In this chapter, the JCHR is presented as a hybrid constitutional watchdog, which works alongside, and in collaboration with, other constitutional and accountability actors across the Westminster landscape.

This chapter tackles two prominent critiques of parliamentary Bills of Rights, namely, that they are thwarted by the Executive dominance of Parliament in Westminster systems, or that parliamentary deliberation about rights is vulnerable to policy distortion and debilitation by the existence of judicial decision making about rights. Charting a course ’from domination to collaboration’, this chapter responds that both these critiques exaggerate the drivers of dominance, with respect to the Executive and especially with respect to the courts. Drawing on recent political science scholarship in Westminster Parliaments, the chapter argues that the Executive is not as dominant and dictatorial as is assumed in popular lore. Moreover, an empirical analysis of political and parliamentary behaviour in the post-HRA era challenges the assertion that the key political actors succumb to a cringing court mimicry. Whilst remaining attentive to the dangers in both directions – i.e. in the direction of Executive aggrandisement or judicial supremacy – this chapter argues that we need to put these threats in perspective. The upshot is a complex picture of constitutional collaboration between powerful political actors, not the straightforward or simple dominance of one over the other.