The Treason Felony Act 1848 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Parts of the Act are still in force. It is a law which protects the Queen and the Crown. The offences in the Act were originally high treason under the Sedition Act 1661, and consequently the penalty was death. However it was found that juries were often reluctant to convict people of capital crimes, and it was thought that the conviction rate might increase if the sentence was reduced to exile to the penal colonies in Australia. Consequently, in 1848 three categories of treason were reduced to felonies. The Act does not prevent prosecutors from charging somebody with treason instead of treason felony if the same conduct amounts to both offences. It is treason felony to "compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend":
to deprive the Queen of her crown,
to levy war against the Queen, or
to "move or stir" any foreigner to invade the United Kingdom or any other country belonging to the Queen.
The full text of the Act is available online. The wording of section 3 of the Act is:
Repealed provisions
was abolished in 1868, leaving life imprisonment as the maximum sentence. Section 4 of the Act contained strict rules about treason felony when committed only by speaking. A conviction required a confession in open court, or the evidence of two witnesses to prove the words spoken. Also a prosecution had to be brought within six days of the offence. Section 4 was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1891.
Discussions
In 2001 The Guardian newspaper mounted an unsuccessful legal challenge to the Act in the High Court, alleging that the act "makes it a criminal offence, punishable by life imprisonment, to advocate abolition of the monarchy in print, even by peaceful means". They sought a declaration that the Human Rights Act 1998 had altered its meaning so that only violent conduct was criminal. The court held that this was a hypothetical question that did not deserve an answer, since The Guardian was not being prosecuted. The case eventually went to the House of Lords on appeal in 2003. In a unanimous judgement the House agreed that the litigation was unnecessary, but most of the judges nevertheless agreed with Lord Steyn's view that "the part of section 3 of the 1848 Act which appears to criminalise the advocacy of republicanism is a relic of a bygone age and does not fit into the fabric of our modern legal system. The idea that section 3 could survive scrutiny under the Human Rights Act is unreal." In December 2013 the Ministry of Justice said that Section 3 of the Act, which had made it an offence punishable by life imprisonment to print, or otherwise "by any overt act or deed" to support the abolition of the monarchy or to "imagine, invent, devise, or intend to deprive or depose" the monarch, had been repealed in early 2013, without publicity. However, the Government later stated that the announcement that it had been repealed was wrong, and that it was still on the statute book.
The last reported case under the Act in the United Kingdom was in 1883, although the Act was used in Australia in 1916 to prosecute the "Sydney Twelve". In 1972 three Irish republicans Joseph Callinan, Louis Marcantonio and Thomas Quinn were initially charged with treason felony, although this was later dropped in favour of lesser charges of seditious utterances.
