Perth Agreement


The Perth Agreement was made in Australia in 2011 by the prime ministers of what were then the sixteen states known as Commonwealth realms, all recognising Elizabeth II as their head of state. The document agreed that the governments of the realms would amend their laws concerning the succession to their shared throne and related matters. The changes, in summary, comprised:
The ban on non-Protestants becoming monarch and the requirement for them to be in communion with the Church of England was not altered.
The Agreement was signed in October 2011 in Perth, Australia, which hosted the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. The institutional and constitutional principles of Commonwealth realms are shared equally as enacted in the Statute of Westminster 1931, which made the process of implementing the agreement lengthy and complex.
By December 2012, all the realm governments had agreed to enact it. New Zealand chaired a working group to determine the process. The Commonwealth realms – at the time including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis – are independent of each other, while sharing one person as monarch in a constitutionally equal fashion. The working group later affirmed that, across all these realms, appropriate laws were passed and came into effect, and then Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg, reiterated this on 26 March 2015. Canada's law was challenged in court but has been upheld.
On the day the changes came into effect in March 2015, the first of the persons affected by the headline provision were the children of Lady Davina Windsor, the elder daughter of Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester and Birgitte, Duchess of Gloucester; the succession positions of Lady Davina's son Tāne and daughter Senna were reversed, Tāne becoming 29th and Senna becoming 28th in line.

Background

Succession to the throne in each of the Commonwealth realms is governed both by common law and statute. Under common law, the Crown was transmitted by male-preference primogeniture, under which succession passed first to the monarch's or nearest dynast's legitimate sons in order of birth, and subsequently to their daughters and their legitimate issue, again in order of birth, so that sons always inherit before their sisters, elder children inherit before younger, and descendants inherit before collateral relatives.
Succession is also governed by the Acts of Union 1707, which restates the provisions of the Act of Settlement 1701, and the Bill of Rights 1689. These laws originally restricted the succession to legitimate descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and debar those who are Catholics or who have married Catholics. The descendants of those who are debarred for being or marrying Catholics, however, may still be eligible to succeed. By a convention made explicit in the preamble to the Statute of Westminster 1931, the line of succession cannot be altered in any realm without the assent of the parliaments of the other 15 realms.
Challenges had been made against the Act of Settlement, especially its provisions regarding Catholics and preference for males. In Canada, where the Act of Settlement is part of Canadian constitutional law, Tony O'Donohue, a former Toronto city councillor, took issue with the provisions that exclude Catholics from the throne In 2002, O'Donohue launched a court action that argued the Act of Settlement violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but the case was dismissed by the court.
In the United Kingdom, from time to time there had been debate over repealing the clause that prevents "Papists" or those who marry one from ascending to the British throne. The Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a motion in 1999 calling for the complete removal of any discrimination linked to the monarchy and the repeal of the Act of Settlement. A private member's bill—the Succession to the Crown Bill—was introduced in the House of Lords in December 2004. The government, headed by Tony Blair, however, blocked all attempts to revise the succession laws, claiming it would raise too many constitutional issues and it was unnecessary at the time. The issue was raised again in January 2009, when a private member's bill to amend the Act of Succession was introduced in parliament. British Labour Member of Parliament Keith Vaz introduced to the House of Commons at Westminster, in early 2011, a private member's bill, which proposed that the Act of Settlement be amended to remove the provisions relating to Catholicism and change primogeniture governing the line of succession to the British throne from male-preference to absolute.

Proposals in 2011

Line of succession

In 2011, the deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg, announced that the British government was considering a change in the law. At about the same time, it was reported that Prime Minister David Cameron had written to the prime ministers of each of the other 15 Commonwealth realms, asking for their support in changing the succession to absolute primogeniture, and notifying them he would raise his proposals at that year's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, Western Australia. While discussions took place during the summit, it was an agenda side accord, as most Commonwealth member states do not have a monarchical form of government - the across-the-board function of Head of the Commonwealth is to convene together nations and celebrate plans, projects, agreements and initiatives between all its members.

At CHOGM on 28 October 2011, the prime ministers of the other Commonwealth realms agreed to support the proposed changes. The proposed changes were to replace male preference primogeniture with absolute primogeniture for all persons in the line of succession born after 28 October 2011, end the disqualification of those who married Catholics, and limit the requirement for those in line to the throne to acquire permission of the sovereign to marry. The prohibition on Catholics becoming monarch would remain. The bill put before the Parliament of the United Kingdom would act as a model for the legislation required to be passed in at least some of the other realms. The Queen was understood to support the changes.
Cameron stated: "The idea that a younger son should become monarch instead of an elder daughter simply because he is a man, or that a future monarch can marry someone of any faith except a Catholic—this way of thinking is at odds with the modern countries that we have become." On the question of continued requirements that the sovereign be a Protestant, Cameron added, "Let me be clear, the monarch must be in communion with the Church of England because he or she is the head of that Church."

Royal marriage

Along with the changes in the succession law, Cameron proposed that the necessity for royal consent to marriages in the royal family should be limited to the first six people in line to the throne. Under the Royal Marriages Act 1772, almost every descendant of King George II needed the Queen's permission to marry, which by 2011 was thousands of people. While the Royal Marriages Act 1772 was in force, marrying without permission made the marriage void. Under the proposed new law, any already formalised marriage that was deemed invalid under the 1772 Act would be retroactively legalised; descendants of such a marriage would however remain excluded from the line of succession to the throne, to ensure that the validity of the descent of the Crown from King George II down to the present day could not be affected by the changes. These changes were approved by the other Commonwealth leaders.

Commentary

Cameron's proposals were supported by the prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, who said she was "very enthusiastic about it. You would expect the first Australian woman prime minister to be very enthusiastic about a change which equals equality for women in a new area." Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper described himself "supportive" of the reforms as "obvious modernizations". The Monarchist League of Canada also expressed favour for the plan, as did Monarchy New Zealand. A poll carried out by Forum Research in February 2013 found that 73% of Canadians polled "agreed with the change, which would permit a first-born female to become queen even if she had brothers."
Scottish first minister Alex Salmond was more critical, saying: "It is deeply disappointing that the reform has stopped short of removing the unjustifiable barrier on a Catholic becoming monarch." While welcoming the gender equality reforms, The Guardian also criticised the failure to remove the ban on Catholics sitting on the throne as "fanning a religious hostility the rest of Europe was already growing beyond." A representative of the British campaigning group Republic said monarchical succession is inherently biased and "To suggest that this has anything to do with equality is utterly absurd," an opinion echoed by Citizens for a Canadian Republic.
Robert Hazell and Bob Morris pointed out that "the realms were free to alter their constitutions without reference to the UK, but the UK could not do so on this occasion without seeking the realms' consent; the realms were relatively freer to alter their constitutions than was the UK itself" and that this inversion of the constitutional situation under imperialism was surprising to some. However, as a corollary, they pointed to Peter Boyce's earlier assertion in The Queen's Other Realms: The Crown and Its Legacy in Australia, Canada and New Zealand that the fact that the change in the succession was initiated by the United Kingdom government was a reminder to the other Commonwealth realms that "their crown is derivative, if not subordinate" to the crown of the United Kingdom.