Perth Agreement

The Agreement was signed in October 2011 in Perth, Australia, which hosted the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

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.

[1]) 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.

[5][6] 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 (born 2012) and daughter Senna (born 2010) were reversed, Tāne becoming 29th and Senna becoming 28th in line.

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[12] 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.

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.

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.

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.

[16] In 2011, the deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg, announced that the British government was considering a change in the law.

[17][18] 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 (CHOGM) in Perth, Western Australia.

[31] 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.

"[39] 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.

"[15] 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.

However, Queensland Premier Campbell Newman disagreed, citing Section 7 of the Australia Act 1986 and concluding from it that each state is sovereign and each should therefore pass its own legislation affecting the succession laws in its jurisdiction.

Western Australia had an election, and I guess that slowed things down a little bit, and in a practical sense, given that the immediacy had gone out of the matter and given that the next three people in line to the monarchy are males, it did not arise.

[59] The Northern Territory government introduced a bill to request the federal parliament to change the law relating to royal succession in similar terms.

The position taken by the federal Cabinet was that Canada has no royal succession laws, the country's monarch being automatically whoever is monarch of the United Kingdom, and the Canadian parliament need only assent to the changes made to the laws of succession in the United Kingdom by that realm's parliament, which can be achieved by ordinary legislation, without the approval of the provinces.

There was some speculation in the press before the birth of Prince George of Cambridge about Canada having a different line of succession to the other realms if the Canadian law were eventually found to be unconstitutional.

[6][71] The validity of the Canadian parliament's legislation came under judicial review in the Quebec Superior Court over,[72] among other matters, its alleged failure to "follow the amending procedure" set out in section 41 of the Constitution Act, 1982.

[87] According to the Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who sponsored the British government's Succession to the Crown Bill in the House of Lords, the governments of Jamaica and Belize had outlined that neither country would require domestic legislation to give effect to changes to the lines of succession to their thrones, as those lines were left by Belize's and Jamaica's constitutions to law of the United Kingdom.

[99][100] The remaining realms (Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, St Lucia, Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu) concluded that legislation was not necessary.