Geoffrey Robertson: A hereditary head of state and a system based on sexism and religious discrimination have no place in the 21st century

A hereditary head of state and a system based on sexism and religious discrimination have no place in 21st-century Britain

The government's plans to update the monarchy are welcome so far as they go, but they do not go very far. Removing the sex and religious discrimination embedded in the British constitution the 1701 Act of Settlement is long overdue. But the anomaly remains: why should an important public office, that of head of state, be filled, not on merit or by public election, but exclusively by the descendants of a 17th-century German princess?

Under the British constitution, it is the Act of Settlement which determines upon whom the crown shall descend. It reads today as a blood curdling anti-catholic diatribe, providing that any monarch who holds communion with the Church of Rome or marries a papist shall be unthroned immediately. It creates for the UK a white Anglo-German protestant head of state descending from the body of the Princess Sophia of Hanover according to the feudal principle of primogeniture, which requires inheritance down the male line. This is in blatant contravention of the Sex Discrimination Act whilst the requirement that the monarch be an Anglican amounts to discrimination on grounds of religion and is contrary to the Human Rights Act. Why would Charles be unfit to be king if he became a Methodist, or a Hindu or Muslim or Rastarfarian? It is wholly unacceptable to have this primitive bigotry embodied in the rules for choosing a head of state. The laws which define and protect the royal family breach at least four articles of the European convention on human rights. They are obsolete and obnoxious.

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