Tag: Hirst v UK (No.2)
-
Elizabeth Adams: Prisoners’ Voting Rights: Case Closed?
On 6 December 2018, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe closed the supervision of the prisoners’ voting rights cases against the United Kingdom (UK) and adopted final resolution CM/ResDH(2018)467. Thirteen years after Hirst v United Kingdom (No.2) (2006) 42 EHRR 41 (Hirst) was made final, the protracted prisoner voting stalemate is over.…
-
Graeme Cowie: Prisoners to Devolved Fortune? The Right to Vote and the Scotland Act 2016
The Hirst (No 2) v United Kingdom judgment has proven to be one of the most contentious of decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. Its subject matter, prisoner voting, has also served both to illustrate and to some extent to define the relationship between that Court and our domestic legal and constitutional order.…
-
HRA Watch: Reform, Repeal, Replace? Elizabeth Stokes: Prisoners’ Rights in Context: What Future under a British Bill of Rights?
Editors’ note: The blog is inviting constitutional lawyers to comment on the UK Government’s proposal to repeal and replace the Human Rights Act. We continue with a post by Elizabeth Stokes, Senior Lecturer at the School of Business & Law, University of East London. You can read the other contributions in this series here. Posts on the…
-
Craig Prescott: Conference Report: Prisoner Voting and the Constitution 18th June 2014, Faculty of Laws, UCL
As is well known to readers of this blog, the issue of prisoner voting has been a long running and high profile saga. The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling has argued that it is a ‘totemic issue’ that shows how the ECtHR has ‘lost democratic acceptability’ (Guardian, 20 Nov 2013). However, this issue can only be…
-
Helen Fenwick: Prisoners’ Voting Rights, Subsidiarity, and Protocols 15 and 16: Re-creating Dialogue With the Strasbourg Court?
This blog does not intend to rehearse the merits of the prisoners’ voting rights saga. In principle it is hard to muster reasons providing a basis for banning prisoners from voting: other rights related to the democratic process, such as association and free expression, may necessarily be somewhat circumscribed by the fact of imprisonment (although…
-
Alison L. Young: Prisoner Voting: Human or Constitutional Right?
As is well known, in Hirst v UK (No 2) the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights concluded that Section 3(1) of the Representation of the People Act 1983, which removed the franchise from prisoners, was a disproportionate restriction of the right to vote found in article 3 of the First Protocol to…
-
Chintan Chandrachud: Prisoner Voting Rights in India
Whether prisoners should have the right to vote has been the subject of intense political debate in the UK for a few years now. In Hirst ((2006) 42 E.H.R.R. 41) as well as Scoppola ([2012] E.C.H.R. 868), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that blanket prohibitions on the voting rights of convicted prisoners…
-
Colm O’Cinneide: Prisoners Votes (Again) and the ‘Constitutional Illegitimacy’ of the ECHR
The relationship between the UK and the European Court of Human Rights is once again in the news. On the 22th May last, the Grand Chamber of the Strasbourg Court delivered its judgment in Scoppola v. Italy (No. 3), Application No. 126/05. This decision marks a potentially decisive moment in the long-running saga of prisoner…