Uncodified UK constitution & digital sovereignty

Extended summary — Uncodified UK constitution & digital sovereignty

From an unwritten constitution to technical guarantees

To go further, this extended summary sheds light on four major axes for cyber culture:

First, a constitutional order without a “sacred text”

In the United Kingdom, the constitution is not a single, supreme document but rather a bundle of sources: statutes (Bill of Rights 1689, Human Rights Act 1998…), case-law (Miller, Ghaidan, GCHQ…), political conventions (ministerial responsibility, the role of the Cabinet) and customs. This plasticity allows rapid adaptation to crises, as Brexit demonstrated, yet it also makes the system more difficult to read and understand for ordinary citizens.

Second, fundamental rights that are legally protected… but revisable.

Rights to life, privacy, freedom of expression or non-discrimination are, in practice, well protected through the ECHR as incorporated by the Human Rights Act 1998 and through dynamic jurisprudence. In theory, however, these rights remain anchored in ordinary statutes, which may be amended or repealed by a parliamentary majority, even if the political cost of such a move would be extremely high.

Third, a system of checks and balances largely built by judges.

The Supreme Court and higher courts act as a crucial safety net: they control governmental prerogatives (Miller), review the justiciability of certain royal prerogatives (GCHQ) and interpret ordinary statutes in light of convention rights (Ghaidan). This common-law constitutionalism works as a “backstop” that partially compensates for the absence of a codified constitutional text.

Finally, the rise of technical counter-powers.

Within this environment, sovereign offline encryption technologies, without servers or trusted third parties, become another form of counter-power. They make any future attempt to impose generalised backdoors or to centralise keys materially more difficult. Freemindtronic patents granted in the United Kingdom fit into this context: they legally formalise a technical sovereignty doctrine at the heart of a constitutional order that remains highly flexible.

Uncodified UK constitution: full chronicle & digital sovereignty

The chronicle that follows proposes a cross-reading: on the one hand, the Uncodified UK constitution as analysed by Nina Angela Fernando; on the other, the sovereign technical architectures developed by Freemindtronic and protected by patents granted in the UK. The objective is not to decide “for or against a written constitution”, but rather to show how these institutional choices shape and intersect with the issues of encryption, privacy and technical counter-powers.

Uncodified UK constitution: a democracy without a single text

Uncodified UK constitution: a “dispersed” constitution

The United Kingdom has no single document entitled “Constitution”. Instead, we find a set of sources:

• Historic statutes (Magna Carta 1215, Bill of Rights 1689, Parliament Acts, Human Rights Act 1998, Constitutional Reform Act 2005, etc.);
• Common law, where judges define and refine constitutional principles case by case;
• Political conventions (for example, the Prime Minister must be a member of the House of Commons, the government must resign if it loses the confidence of the House);
• Practices and usages recorded in documents such as the Cabinet Manual and, more recently, research papers from the House of Commons Library.

This system has two major strengths:

• it is highly adaptable: Parliament can rapidly pass major reforms without a heavy constitutional amendment procedure;
• it allows continuous interaction between the legislature, the courts and political conventions, instead of freezing power balances in an “untouchable” text.

However, this flexibility comes at a cost: it is difficult for a citizen — or even for a foreign lawyer — to clearly identify “where the constitution is” and which parts of this ensemble are genuinely untouchable.

Brexit: a stress test for the Uncodified UK constitution

Thus, Brexit served as a real stress test for this system. The question whether the government could trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union without Parliament’s consent led to the judgment in R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5. The Supreme Court held that:

• the government could not, by simple use of the royal prerogative in foreign affairs, modify rights granted by an Act of Parliament;
• therefore, explicit parliamentary authorisation was required to notify withdrawal from the EU.

In a State with a codified constitution, part of this question would have been answered directly in the text (distribution of powers, hierarchy of norms, treaty ratification and withdrawal procedures). In the United Kingdom, it is common law reasoning and judicial argumentation that, retrospectively, fixed the rule.

For cyber culture, this dimension is essential: it shows that the rules of the game on issues as central as sovereignty, treaties or (tomorrow) encryption and surveillance can be shaped through cases as they arise rather than fully anticipated in a stable constitutional text.

Uncodified UK constitution: fundamental rights and “elective dictatorship”

Uncodified UK constitution: Human Rights Act & ECHR as a shield

In practical terms, the protection of fundamental rights in the United Kingdom mainly relies on:

• the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR);
• its incorporation into domestic law via the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA).

This framework allows the courts:

• to interpret domestic statutes, as far as possible, in a way that is compatible with the ECHR;
• to issue a declaration of incompatibility between a statute and the Convention (without striking down the statute automatically, but creating strong political pressure to amend it);
• to offer robust remedies to individuals whose rights have been violated.

Cases such as Daly, Ghaidan or A and others illustrate the courts’ ability to reinforce rights through imaginative and protective interpretation.

However, as Nina Angela Fernando stresses, the HRA is an ordinary statute. In theory, a future Parliament could:

• repeal it outright; or
• adopt a new, less protective national “Bill of Rights” in the name of sovereignty.

This is what Lord Hailsham famously called the risk of an “elective dictatorship”: a parliamentary majority produced by a majoritarian electoral system may concentrate power without the procedural safeguards of a rigid constitution.

A political impossibility… but not a mathematical one

In reality, many constraints make a brutal rollback of rights unlikely:

• public opinion and civil society;
• international commitments;
• judicial resistance to overly restrictive interpretations;
• the political and diplomatic cost of a clear break with the ECHR system.

Yet, for a security engineer or an architect of sovereign systems, the question is not framed in terms of political probability but rather in terms of the risk surface. A right that can, in theory, be weakened should, therefore, be doubled by a technical guarantee.

This is where sovereign encryption comes in: it makes it far more difficult, even for a determined State, to turn a legal hypothesis into an operational reality of mass surveillance.

Institutional checks and balances

In the United Kingdom, checks and balances rest on several pillars:

• the Parliament, which can scrutinise the executive (committees, questions, confidence votes);
• the courts, which control the use of governmental powers and interpret statutes (GCHQ, Miller, Ghaidan…);
• conventions and political culture, which impose unwritten standards of behaviour (ministerial responsibility, resignations, independent inquiries);
• oversight bodies (parliamentary committees, independent authorities, sometimes under pressure but still active).

These mechanisms are real and often effective. Yet they remain anchored in the realm of law and politics. They intervene after the fact, once a bill, an administrative practice or an executive decision has already raised concerns.

Cryptographic checks and balances

Furthermore, Freemindtronic architectures introduce another type of checks and balances, this time at the technical level:

• Local & offline encryption: secrets are encrypted and stored on media physically controlled by the user, without any dependency on a server.
• Key segmentation: keys are fragmented or distributed according to schemes that prevent any single actor (provider, State, administrator) from unlocking the system alone.
• No central trusted third party: no single authority holds master keys or can trigger global decryption.
• Embedded traceability (black box): some devices record critical security events without feeding a central database.

Where the Uncodified UK constitution organises a political balance of powers, these architectures organise a cryptographic balance of powers. The objective is similar: to prevent a single centre of power from deciding, seeing or modifying everything.

Freemindtronic patents granted in the UK — An embodied technical sovereignty

Inventions rooted in British law

Freemindtronic technologies (smart electrical protection, wireless access control, segmented keys, offline HSMs) are protected by several patents granted in the United Kingdom, alongside their protection in France, across Europe and in other jurisdictions.

These patents notably cover:

• systems for monitoring and protecting the power supply of an electrical device, with tamper-evident logging of events (a “black box” logic);
• a wireless access control system that unlocks a device or service without relying on a connected biometric system or a remote server;
• a segmented-key authentication system, in which critical secrets are never held in full by a single medium or a single actor.

The fact that these inventions are protected in the United Kingdom is more than a mere administrative detail: it means they are recognised and framed by British law in a country that is deeply engaged in debates about reconciling national security, privacy and digital sovereignty.

A technical doctrine at the heart of a flexible constitutional order

Within an uncodified constitutional order where:

• legal balances can evolve rapidly;
• surveillance laws can be revised at the margin or in depth;
• debates on encryption and backdoors are recurrent,

Freemindtronic patents play a specific role:

• they embody a technical sovereignty doctrine: no third-party servers, no central identity databases, no master keys;
• they offer British public and private actors the possibility to adopt counter-espionage solutions that remain robust even if the legal environment tightens;
• they demonstrate that digital sovereignty is not only defined in legal texts but also in the way technical architectures are designed, patented and deployed.

In this sense, these patents amount to a kind of “technical constitution”: they fix, in the field of engineering, principles of non-centralisation, key segmentation and local control that concretely limit what a power, even one that is legally sovereign, can do.

Weak signals — Towards increased conflict over encryption

These elements are weak signals, yet they carry scenarios that deserve close monitoring from a digital sovereignty perspective.

Freemindtronic sovereign use case — Protecting secrets in a flexible constitutional State

What we have not (yet) covered

Strategic perspective — Legal sovereignty & technical sovereignty

At first sight, many observers confine the debate on codifying the UK constitution to public law lecture halls. In reality, this debate shapes the core of cyber culture and digital sovereignty.

• A State with an Uncodified UK constitution builds its political stability on dynamic balances between statutes, courts, conventions and political culture.
• Institutions in the United Kingdom do protect fundamental rights effectively even without a single constitutional text — yet political power relations continue to expose these rights to potential pressure.
• In this context, technical counter-powers (sovereign encryption, key segmentation, absence of trusted third parties) play a decisive role and reinforce overall resilience.

For Freemindtronic, the fact that its patents operate under UK law is anything but anecdotal. The United Kingdom recognises and protects a rigorous technical doctrine built around one clear principle: those who physically hold the secrets exercise ultimate control, not any central authority.

As democracies reshape their approach to encryption regulation, the convergence between:

• Legal sovereignty — distribution of powers, protection of rights, role of the judiciary; and
• Technical sovereignty — offline architectures, absence of servers, segmented-key patent portfolio;

emerges as a major strategic issue. The Uncodified UK constitution shows that freedom never exists only on paper: institutions and practices embody it every day, and sovereign encryption technologies now make abuses of power mathematically costly.