Page:Status of the Union Act 1934 and Royal Executive Functions and Seals Act 1934.djvu/1

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[Date of commencement―22nd August, 1934.

To provide for the declaration of the Status of the Union of South Africa; for certain amendments of the South Africa Act, 1909, incidental thereto, and for the adoption of certain parts of the Statute of Westminster, 1931.

(Assented to by His Majesty the King on the 22nd June, 1934.) (Signed by the Governor-General in Afrikaans.)

HEREAS the delegates of His Majesty’s Governments in the United Kingdom, the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland, at Imperial Conferences holden at Westminster in the years of our Lord 1926 and 1930, did concur in making the declarations and resolutions set forth in the Reports of the said Conferences, and more particularly in defining the group of self-governing communities composed of Great Britain and the Dominions as “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external afiairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”;

the said resolutions and declarations in so far as they required legislative sanction on the part of the United Kingdom have been ratified, confirmed and established by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in an Act entitled the Statute of Westminster, 1931 (22. Geo. V. c. 4);

it is expedient that the status of the Union of South Africa as a sovereign independent state as hereinbefore defined shall be adopted and declared by the Parliament of the Union and that the South Africa Act, 1909 (9. Edw. 7. c. 9) be amended accordingly;

it is expedient that the said Statute of Westminster, in so far as its provisions are applicable to the Union of South Africa, and an Afrikaans version thereof, shall be adopted as an Act of the Parliament of the Union of South Africa;

OW, THEREFORE, be it declared and enacted by the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Senate and the House of Assembly of the Union of South Africa, as follows:―

1. In this Act the expression “the South Africa Act” means the South Africa Act, 1909 (9. Edw. 7. c. 9) as amended from time to time.

2. The Parliament of the Union shall be the sovereign legislative power in and over the Union, and notwithstanding anything in any other law contained, no Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland passed after the eleventh day of December, 1931, shall extend, or be deemed to extend, to the Union as part of the law of the Union, unless extended thereto by an Act of the Parliament of the Union.