Equality comes to Luxembourg

Something I missed from last week: Luxembourg has become the 17th country in the world to allow same-sex marriage:

Lawmakers in Luxembourg, whose prime minister is openly gay, have overwhelmingly approved changes in the small European nation's legislation governing marriage that will allow people of the same sex to wed and to adopt children.

The Chamber of Deputies voted 56-4 to adopt the bill, which is said to be part of the most fundamental rewrite of Luxembourg's laws on marriage since 1804. The chamber's website said the new rules could take effect in early 2015, or six months after their official publication.

The next big target is probably Germany. There's a clear pro-equality majority there both among the public and in the Bundestag, but the Social Democrats are in coalition with the bigot union (CDU/CSU), and may vote with their new friends (and to protect their Ministerial positions) rather than their supporters. The politics of that could get very ugly indeed...

Accountability and spying: NZ vs Luxembourg

Luxembourg's Service de Renseignement de l'Etat has been running amok, bugging politicians, amassing files on over 300,000 people (half the population), engaging in corrupt business deals, bribing officials and allegedly even masterminding bombings to boost its own budget. So, the Prime Minister has done the decent thing, and resigned.

Isn't it nice to see someone accepting responsibility for their failure to properly oversee and keep a leash on their spies?

Meanwhile, here in New Zealand, 88 people have illegally been spied upon, the GCSB has "reinterpreted" the law to allow it to do whatever it wants, and they're up to their necks in the NSA PRISM scandal. And no-one has accepted responsibility or been punished for it. So much for accountability, and so much for democratic control of our spies.

Monarchy bows to democracy in Luxembourg

An interesting constitutional development in Luxembourg this week: earlier in the month, Luxembourg's monarch, citing "reasons of conscience", refused to sign a bill legalising euthanasia for the terminally ill. Then he turned around and called on Parliament to change the constitution to strip him of that power. On Thursday, the Parliament obliged, overwhelmingly passing the amendment through its first reading. It will get its second reading and become law sometime this week, clearing the way for the euthanasia bill to become law by Friday. And so Luxembourg's monarchy bows to democracy.

It's time our monarchy did the same. While the power to refuse assent is a monarchical fiction which has not been used for three hundred years, thanks to the phrasing of s16 of the Constitution Act, it keeps cropping up. It's long past time we put an end to it. The amendment required would be simple - simply make it clear that the Governor-General must sign a bill, or impose a one-week time limit as a fallback. Alternatively, we could follow the pattern of European democracies, and have the Speaker sign bills into law. Either way, the fiction would end, and it would be finally clear where law-making power lies in New Zealand: with the elected Parliament, rather than the unelected monarch.