Joint Sitting of Both Houses of Parliament . . . to give force of law to the Separate Representation of Voters Act, 1951 . . . 13 to 27 February 1956

. . . and "to define the jurisdiction of the courts of law to pronounce upon the validity of laws passed by Parliament,and to amend the South Africa Act, 1909."

This may have been the most important sitting of both houses of the South African Parliament in the almost half a century since Union. The Government of the day had for five years been trying to removed Coloured voters from the common voters' roll. The 1951 Act and the later Coloured Voters Bill and the High Court of Parliament Bill had all been declared invalid by the Appeal Court. This new Act amended the founding South Africa Act of 1909 constitutionally and could therefore not be challenged in the Appeal Court, with the result that the Coloured voters were indeed removed from the common roll.

The Prime Minister's Second Reading speech to the Joint Sitting is available separately, but this lot is a rare copy of the full report of the Joint Sitting, which runs to xv pp + 922 columns.

The terra cotta cloth-boards, which are gilt-lettered to the spine only, are rubbed at the lower edges front and back and at the lower fore-edges. The binding remains tight. The endpapers are sunned but unmarked and the text is neither marked nor discoloured.