Answer:
Despite its obvious discrimination against female heirs to the throne as well as adherents to the Roman Catholic religion, the Act of Settlement of 1701 officially remained the law of the land in the United Kingdom until 2013, with Parliament’s passage of the Succession to the Crown Act. Seeking to eliminate the inherent discrimination of the original law, and working in consultation with the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II and her heirs, Parliamentary representatives of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom agreed to modify the line of succession laws to change the male-preference primogeniture system to an absolute primogeniture system (first-born heir, regardless of gender).
The Succession to the Crown Act of 2013 also established that an heir could still inherit the throne even if they married a Roman Catholic and no longer required heirs outside of the first six in the line of succession to seek the ruling monarch’s permission to marry.
The new law officially took effect in 2015. However, the ban against heirs who are Roman Catholic from inheriting the throne remains in place, at least officially.
Similar modifications to the laws regarding line of succession in other constitutional monarchies around the world were made much earlier.
Belgium, for example, has used absolute primogeniture since 1991, and the system has been in place in the Kingdom of the Netherlands and in Sweden for decades. Spain, however, still uses a system of male-preference primogeniture.
Explanation:
