Six months to end 'indiscriminate' prisoner voting ban
Britain has six months to draft new laws to end its blanket ban on prisoners voting in elections or face penalties totalling millions of pounds, it has emerged following a ruling from Europe’s human rights court.
The court ruled that Britain’s ‘automatic and indiscriminate’ disqualification of all prisoners from voting was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, but reaffirmed that it was up to individual states to decide how to legislate to remove these indiscriminate bans - as it held in the case of Hirst v UK in 2005.
Hirst had been the first UK prisoner to challenge his disenfranchisement. Some 2,500 similar applications have since been lodged with the court, with the number continuing to grow. The government has six months starting from yesterday to bring forward legislative proposals to amend the law and end the blanket ban. Failure to comply could see the UK facing financial claims from all these applicants, costing millions of pounds.
Yesterday’s ruling by 17 judges sitting in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights arose from the case of Italian national Franco Scoppola who, upon receiving a life sentence for murder and other crimes, forfeited his right to vote.
Scoppola appealed to the court, which found that his disenfranchisement was not in breach of the convention because in Italian law disenfranchisement depends upon the length of the sentence and is not ‘automatic and indiscriminate’ as it is in the UK.
Prison Reform Trust director Juliet Lyon said: ‘People are sent to prison to lose their liberty, not their identity. The UK’s outdated ban on sentenced prisoners voting, based on the 19th-century concept of civic death, has no place in a modern democracy and is legally and morally unsustainable. The European court has made clear in today’s judgment that the UK has legal obligations to overturn the blanket ban.’
Comments
It seems to me that this
It seems to me that this issue is one which could easily have been dealt with by successive governments in a way that would satisfy the requirements of the convention. In fact in the Scoppola case the ECtHR is effectively showing how it can be done, and that voting rights need not be given to the worst offenders in society, yet in the UK we continue to refuse to budge while building up a backlog of potentially expensive claims. Why has it not been dealt with thus far? Because it is a populist vote winning issue not to allow prisoner votes.
There are numerous ways that prisoner voting could be accomodated (other than the Italian example) which could perhaps satisfy the requirements of Human rights law, and yet still meet the requirements of justice in the eyes of the public, yet all we get is political fury over the subject. How much fury will there be when it turns out that the government has to pay millions of pounds of taxpayers money to successful claimants?
political decision
Prisoners by and large eminate from the lowest social strata and are unlikely to be Conservative voters. This may have something to do with the Government's stance. Similarly, legal aid claimants and benefit claimants probably arent Tories. Hence the dismantling of the benefit state and the lega aid system.
There again it may have
There again it may have something to with the common sense position that if you are judicially deprived of liberty, you can't go to vote.