Lord Bingham assessed the respective roles of Parliament, the executive, and the judiciary and decisively rejected a distinction which the Attorney-General had attempted to draw between democratic institutions such as the Immigration Service and the courts. It was

"wrong to stigmatise judicial decision-making as in some way undemocratic. It is particularly inappropriate in a case such as the present in which Parliament has expressly legislated in section 6 of the 1998 Act to render unlawful any act of a public authority...incompatible with a Convention right.

The greater the legal content of any issue, the greater the potential role of the court, because under our constitution and subject to the sovereign power of parliament it is the function of the courts and not of political bodies to resolve legal questions."