By Evarist Baimu Nyaga Mawalla - Home

member of the home civil service upon which perforce it must rely for theadministration of its policies and the correlative disability of the executivegovernment that is in power o agree with a civil savant that his service should beon terms that did not make him subject to instant dismissal should be ascribed tothe prerogative or merely to a consequence of the survival for entirely differentreasons of a rule of constitutional law whose origin is to be found in the theorythat those by whom the administration of the realm is carried on do so aspersonal savants of the monarch who can dismiss them at will because the Kingcan do no wrongNevertheless, whatever label may be attaché to them there have unquestionablysurvived into the present day a residue of miscellaneous fields of law in which theexecutive government retrains decision-making powers that are not dependentupon any statutory authority but nevertheless have consequence on the privaterights or legitimate expectations of other persons which would render thedecision subject to judicial review if the power of the decision-maker to makethem were statutory in origin. From matters so relatively minor as the grant ofpardons to condemned criminals of honours to the good and great of corporatepersonality to deserving bodies of persons and of bounty from money madeavailable to the executive government by parliament they extend to matters sovital to the survival and welfare of the nation as the conduct of relations withforeign states and what lies at the heart of the present case the defence of therealm against potential enemies Adopting the phraseology used in theEuropean Convention on Human Rights 1953 (Convention for the protection ofhuman Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1953) Cmd. 8969 to which theUnited Kingdom is a party it has now become usual in statues to refer to thelatter as national security.My Lords I see no reason why simply because a decision- making power isderived form common law and not a statutory source. It should for that reasononly be immune from judicial review judicial review has I think developed to astage today when without reiterating any analysis of the steps by which thedevelopment has come about one con conveniently classify under three heads344