Source: https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2011/05/18/jeff-king-should-prisoners-have-the-right-to-vote/
Timestamp: 2017-11-21 04:33:00
Document Index: 771141415

Matched Legal Cases: ['Art 3', 'art 2', 'art 2', 'art 2', 'art 2', 'art 8', 'art 10']

Jeff King: Should prisoners have the right to vote? | UK Constitutional Law Association
I think they should, and want to explain why in a way that addresses the issue recently faced by the courts and by Parliament. The prisoner voting saga culminated in the Hirst v UK (No.2) [2005] ECHR 681 case before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, and the nearly five hour debate on the floor of the House of Commons which ended with a 234-22 vote in favour of a resolution that “supports the current situation in which no prisoner is able to vote except those imprisoned for contempt, default or on remand.”: House of Commons Debates, 10 February 2011, Vol 523, No.116, 493-586. The saga, for Parliament, represented two distinct issues: whether the Strasbourg Court was exceeding its competency; and whether prisoners ought, as a moral and human rights matter, to have the right to vote. This blog entry is concerned only with the second of these questions, but as it turns out, the status of the right to vote as a human right is highly relevant to the resolution of this moral issue.
Jeff King is a Fellow and Tutor in Law at Balliol College, Oxford.
27 comments on “Jeff King: Should prisoners have the right to vote?”
Varun here. (you taught me jurisprudence last year!). I hope you are well. I came across this (fairly old), but decent article. I thought I’d share it with you. It’s on the role of the penal system in general: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/23/comment.politics
This is an interesting post but I think you have left out the strongest argument against prisoner’s having the right to vote. This is that in virtually all cases rights have to have accompanying responsibilities – as is acknowledged by the ECHR itself, where rights can be derogated from or subject to lawful, reasonable and proportional limitations. The exception is the Art 3 right not to be subjected to torture. Even the right to life is not absolute – people can be killed in self defence, for example.
The voting right carries an obvious reflected responsiblity. A right to vote is ultimately the right to have a say in the laws that govern society, of which the most fundamental are the criminal laws. The accompanying responsibility is the obligation to obey those laws. Why should someone who has chosen not to obey them nevertheless have the right to decide how they apply to everyone else?
I wrote about this a bit more here: http://timesandotherthings.blogspot.com/2011/04/prisoners-voting-and-britains.html.
The other point is that prisoners do have the right to vote – before they choose to commit crimes – and will regain it once they have served their time.
Thanks for taking time to write your reply. I don’t think that the idea of responsibilities adds anything to the arguments I canvassed in my entry, but I do think that your use of the idea – which is similar to that of the Conservative Party under Prime Minister Cameron (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/jun/26/conservatives.constitution) – exposes the mischievous way in which the idea is presently being used. The mischief is that “responsibilities” are presented as a justification for derogating from our rights, for “rebalancing” rights in the way you’ve suggested. If you violate a “responsibility”, the argument goes, you lose that entitlement we thought was a human right. Does that then mean that prisoners lose all their other rights in prison? Why not? The answer to that question is the same answer to why we should not deprive prisoners of the right to vote – these are basic rights, and they aren’t taken away lightly, if at all.
The idea of responsibilities, by the way, has an interesting pedigree that I doubt the Conservative Party is fully aware of (perhaps Labour was). Consider this line, which sounds (apart from the dated language) like it’s excerpted from Cameron’s speech: “[We] consider it the duty of man to claim the rights of man and a citizen, not only for himself, but for every man who does his duty. No rights without duties, no duties without rights.” Actually, that was from the preamble of the Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association, written in 1864 by Karl Marx.
You ask why people who have disobeyed the law should have any say in making them. Does that mean that the Plane Stupid people and Fathers 4 Justice should be disenfranchised? “Well they’re not murderers!” you’ll no doubt say. Right, but they did break the law, so you need a new argument. Suppose you do think they should lose the vote. Two questions then: (1) where does it stop? (2) why give the vote back when the prison term expires? Now, let’s suppose you think there is a relevant difference between jailed criminal offenders and civil disobedience, and we should deny the vote to the former but not the latter. It’s precisely that kind of selectivity of the targets (over and above the inconsistency of the justification) that I am worried about here. These people are vulnerable to serious community bias, and the causes of crime are complex. In these situations, in my view, we want to give human rights the benefit of the doubt, even if it must be done grudgingly in cases where we feel sure (or even know) the people to be bad people. We do that with criminal procedure and fair trials, and we should do it with voting as well. Or so that’s my opinion!
I hope that does justice to your considered reply. I must sign off for the weekend so apologies if any rejoinder goes unanswered!
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I too am about to leave for the weekend, and this post will therefore be short, but will try and come back in more detail next week other commitments permitting.
I think the idea of rights and responsibilities is a bit older than Marx …
If I’m honest I think you are aiming for a sort of doctrinal purity here with your view of rights, which is impossible to achieve, and your arguments are open to the same sort of objections you raise against mine. For example, you say “if prisoners then why not civil disobedience” – I could just as easily say “if prisoners should retain the right to vote then why not the right to liberty?” Why any form of punishment at all?
Prison obviously entails the abrogation of some rights – principally liberty. I don’t see that it is wrong removing the right to vote too, where the disdain for the law has been so great as to warrant a sentence of imprisonment. (Technically I’ve broken the law if I drive at 71 mph, but no-one suggests I should lose my liberty for that fact alone.) Or you could argue for the removal only where the sentence is of a certain duration, as some did following Hirst (No. 2).
So to answer your questions: (1) it starts and stops with crimes adjudged so seriously that they merit a term of imprisonment; (2) you give it back afterwards because the prisoner is deemed to have done his or her time and therefore repaid the debt to society. (In the same way as they recover their right to liberty.) Yes some are on licence forever and I would agree to them recovering the right to vote – on the understanding of course that they forfeit it if they commit another imprisonable offence.
That doesn’t strike me as selective, any more than saying some crimes carry prison terms and others don’t. (It’s interesting to speak of prisoners as vulnerable when many are locked up to protect the public …) I don’t see it as cruel or unusual punishment, to use American parlance. Quite the contrary – we all speak of rights and responsibilities in terms of personal morality, as we learn from the word go when our parents allow us to do certain things but expect behavioural standards in return.
Dear Jeff, You may find of interest the following paper that I wrote analysing the ongoing debate in different jurisdictions (the United States, South Africa, Australia, and the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights regarding UK and Austrian legislation) as well as in the context of the international human rights treaty regime.
It is downloadable here: http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/international/volume29n2/documents/Ziegler-finalpdf.pdf
It is disappointing that 6 years on this question “Should prisoners have the right to vote?” is still being asked. For the record, on 30 March 2004 the ECtHR answered this in the affirmative and upheld the decision by rejecting the UK’s appeal on 6 October 2005.
Given that the UK has signed up to the Convention and agreed that the Court has the jurisdiction in such matters, the UK cannot legitimately claim that the Court is exceeding its jurisdiction.
The UK had argued that by committing their offences and receiving custodial sentences convicted prisoners have lost the moral authority to vote. However, moral authority is not a qualification for the vote. On the other hand, when the expenses scandal broke the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, opined that Parliament has lost the moral authority to govern. Clearly, there is no moral authority for MPs to fiddle expenses. The prisoners have the high moral ground and Parliament is arguing from the low moral ground.
James Wilson: There is no argument against convicted prisoners having the vote. Moreover, human rights are not dependent upon the victim of abuse acting responsibly. On the other hand, with power comes responsibilities and in this case neither Jack Straw nor Kenneth Clarke has acted responsibly in their roles as Secretary of State for Justice. They are required to ensure that all citizens, including prisoners, get their human rights under the Convention.
What people are getting focused on; is that convicted criminals have owned up to their mistakes…. What people should think about are the criminals running loose, eroding our society with their deviant actions and still deluded in thinking they have a contribution to make in respect to voting.
MPs – Fiddling expenses; This has been going on for years, and still going on to this day
Bankers – Crippling our countries economy with their GREED
Priests – Molestation of young children and no retribution
Leaders of Countries – Manufacturing lies in order to go to War and kill 1,000s of inocent civilians
Businesses – Creating offshore bank accounts in order to avoid Tax payments
Fathers – Who do not financially support their children
All these are examples of the type of ‘upstanding’ citizens, who deserve to vote.
Whats civil or humane about that?
At least prisoners are true to themselves and own up to their own defaults. I’d rather listen to what they have to say about our future.
I welcome your opinion and would like you to take part in my study for my Masters in Criminal Justice.
‘Disenfranchised Inamtes: Should prisoners be given the right to vote?’
I am interviewing a few people in respect to this hot topic and would love to have your input.
Contact: Patrick Email: patrickmadigan@live.co.uk
I do not agree that the vote is a human right. It is qualified by being a law abiding citizen over a certain age. Serving Criminals do not have the right to vote under the British Constitution. However the right to vote was given to women and people over age 18 by acts of Parliament which takes president over EU law as far as I am conserned if you live in UK.
A Human right is the right to live safely in society and breath the air. People who commit criminal acts (against society) and forfit their liberty have certain priveleges of society withdrawn, one of which is the qualification to vote.
People these days talk a lot about Human rights and quite frankly they take a lot for granted.
This is a well argued and attractively presented point of view, but unfortunately one which doesn’t seem to stand up to logical scrutiny. The essence of the argument appears to be this: “the right to vote is a human right; we know it’s a human right because removing it is so very degrading; consequently everyone should have the right all the time (electoral fraud aside)” (the 5th paragraph of the post). This is obvious nonsense:
The right to life, for example, is an unqualified human right. Babies have a right to life even before they are born. The right to be free from torture or degrading treatment is a human right. You can’t torture babies. Yet babies do not have a right to vote. We give people the right to vote when we deem them to be sufficiently old enough to be sufficiently mature (see the judgment in Hirst No. 1, in which that view is articulated in the middle of the judgment arguing for prisoners having the vote). Accordingly, the right to vote isn’t an unqualified human right which is exercisable by all humans, except in the most extreme situations. To say that it should be an unqualified right is simply wrong.
The response would be ‘of course people have to be old enough to understand the vote to be given the right to exercise it’. Once you have admitted that there is a qualification on the right to vote, however, you can’t pretend that qualifications on the right don’t and shouldn’t exist. Rather, you have to join in the debate about where to draw the lines. Even in Hirst, it’s stated that there is a line on voting which can be drawn around “maturity”. If you’ve made an exception for age (capacity) and maturity, why not for their ability to follow rules?
This is what the ECHR had to say:
“For example, the imposition of a minimum age may be envisaged with a view to ensuring the maturity of those participating in the electoral process or, in some circumstances, eligibility may be geared to criteria, such as residence, to identify those with sufficiently continuous or close links to, or a stake in, the country concerned…”
So, even the pro prisoner voting lobby have accepted at the right to vote is qualified by age, maturity, residence, etc. It hardly seems like the right to vote is recognised as an unqualified human right, or a prerequisite for human dignity, and that observation rather undermines the logic behind the argument.
But nothing in my argument turned on it being an absolute right. I walked through why the test we ordinarily use for limiting qualified rights does not morally justify disenfranchisement (and I leave aside institutional considerations of deference that might face the Strasbourg Court). I argued that it failed that test. And the test that I applied ( i.e. legitimate aim and necessary means) adequately explains all the other conditions you gave (and which I had fully in mind when I wrote the post).
PS. on the right to life being an absolute right, reconsider the text of the ECHR:
* (a) in defence of any person from unlawful violence;
* (b) in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent escape of a person lawfully detained;
* (c) in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection.
Of course everyone knows that there are qualifications to art 2; it was a simple shorthand to omit it. However, my point was that the art 2 right applies to everyone, however old they are, unless there is a justifiable limitation, as you correctly point out. You don’t, however, have to pass the hurdle of society valuing your ‘maturity’ first to qualify for an art 2 right, which you do for your voting right, in every single ECHR state. If the art 2 point adds anything, it reduces the force of your argument, as it means that even that profound right can be qualified.
This is what you argue; “…namely that the right to vote is a fundamental human right. It is not a privilege, like a driving license or access to the gym on weeknights. … The fact that it is a human right means it is among the most basic conditions for human dignity, autonomy, and citizenship. One does not forfeit a fundamental human right as the default penalty for non-compliance with law.”
I don’t think you’ve produced any evidence whatsoever for that assertion. Unfairness in society is a different point. Further, you can’t argue that voting is a prerequisite for human dignity; unless you say that children aren’t human (which is the natural consequence of your argument being correct). What about people without sufficient mental capacity to vote (again, under maturity) – are they not human too? At what age do we deem people mature? That varies in different countries, and clearly isn’t an absolute rule. It follows that the right to vote involves a judgment of the quality of the mind behind the vote. so voting isn’t something that everyone has – the starting point is that noone has it, unless and until they deserve it.
Accordingly, the right to vote is already qualified by factors which involve a judgment as to the value of a person’s vote. It’s a very small step from saying that someone isn’t mature enough to vote (which we already do), to saying that someone loses their ‘maturity’ through their failure to follow rules (in the same way that a judge might routinely say in sentencing, ‘ that was a cowardly attack’, or ‘it was an immature act of vandalism’). To omit that restriction on the right to vote as the starting point seriously warps the debate.
For completeness, since that is obviously important, the right to vote following a conviction was similarly limited in republican Roman law. In fact, it’s been a part of legal systems across Europe continuously for two thousand years, rather than a product of an 1870 debate, which you, and the court in Hurst No 1, incorrectly seem to suggest. That’s not to suggest that it’s right simply because it’s old, but rather it’s important to dispel the notion that the restriction on voting was the product of some ‘old fashioned Victorian strictness’.
Further, it would be interesting to attempt to frame the ‘social contract’ argument in the sort of Human Rights language with which the ECHR is familiar: e.g., We live in a democracy. That means that our laws have been made or approved by democratic institutions. Accordingly, a failure to follow a law is a matter relating to democracy. That argument allows one to frame the failure to obey a law in similar terms to interference with an election; the ECHR allows for a restriction on voting for electoral fraud because it relates to a democratic process. It’s seems a weaker argument because the link between breaking a democratically made law isn’t as obviously close to matters relating to democracy as actual interfering with the actual vote, but it’s essentially the same logic.
I agree with your arguments. It is also worth noting in response to EW’s comments above that prisoners retain all their other basic ‘qualified’ rights (freedom from discrimination, freedom of expression, fair trial, privacy, right to marry etc.) except insofar it is necessary to restrict their enjoyment of these rights to maintain prison order and security: however, they completely lose their right to vote on an incidential basis, as an automatic consequence of their loss of liberty. The loss of this right is therefore inconsistent with how prisoners are treated in other ways, and it’s very difficult to identify any sort of coherent rationale for applying it to everyone sentenced to a jail sentence, irrespective of what they actually did.
Frankly, the absolute ban on prisoners voting is a legacy of the UK’s historic attitude to voting, i.e. that it was a privilege to be earned, rather than a right. It also reflects a highly atavistic attitude to prisoners, but that’s a story for another day.
I’m commenting late on this issue I know. But two things:
Those who believe that the ECtHR is imposing its view on prisoner voting on the UK, might pause to reflect on the fact that a number of the leading commonwealth nations no longer impose a blanket ban on prisoner voting (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa). If we think this is a European imposition, why is it that the United Kingdom is also out of line with the emerging commonwealth consensus.
For those who interested in responsibilities, I co-authored a report for the Ministry of Justice in 2009 on this question. The report shows that the constitutions that make rights contingent on responsibilities are the old Soviet Constitution and the current Chinese Constitution (and other authoritarian States). Have a look at the Annexes – its all there (http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/docs/research-rights-responsibilities.pdf)
“The UK had argued that by committing their offences and receiving custodial sentences convicted prisoners have lost the moral authority to vote. However, moral authority is not a qualification for the vote. On the other hand, when the expenses scandal broke the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, opined that Parliament has lost the moral authority to govern. Clearly, there is no moral authority for MPs to fiddle expenses. The prisoners have the high moral ground and Parliament is arguing from the low moral ground.”
What about those prisoners who are former MPs in jail because of false expenses claims? Do they regain the moral highground once they’re in jail?
Liora Lazarus – don’t be so ridiculous. You managed a report on that? Most of the rights in the ECHR are limited by the necessary, proportionate etc qualification and often by the need to balance other competing rights eg art 8 v art 10 in the media injunction cases. What is the rationale behind such restrictions and balancing exercises if not an acknowledgement of the concept of responsibility? No-one is suggesting total obliteration of rights for prisoners or anyone else who fails to show responsibility, but unless you want a total breakdown of society and law and order some notion, somewhere, that someone has to take responsibility for their own actions has to factor into the legal system.
For me this comes down to, do we vote for what we would personally want or for what we perceive to be best for society ?
A criminal often acts against moral and ethical issues for personal gain.
Should that mentality have any influence on who rules a society they have been excluded from ?
I have come to this very late I know, but it is still an issue.
The idea that maturity is what qualifies a right to vote is just simply false. Its just age. We like to think that when a person turns 18 they are mature enough to know what is going on, but in my experience most of them are more concerned with the fact they can now legally drink. They do not really pay attention to the world of politics until it suits them and we allow all of them to vote, whether they choose to or not is their decision, so why shouldn’t it be the same for prisoners? Some of whom are arguably more mature and educated.
Yes they have broken the law, but does that mean that they can’t have a say in something that affects them? Who gets elected effects the prison system, why should those outside of prison be the only ones who get to decide? That is my opinion anyway.
Not all prisoners will want to vote. But there are those who want to help change the society (that in a lot of cases let them down so they turned to crime in a first place) for the better, can that really be a bad thing?
I’m only 19, and don’t purport to know all the ins and outs of this. But I see it as, if we want prisoners to come back into society and be a model citizen then maybe we should let them have a say on the type of society they come back into.
of course they have the right to vote they commit crimes but that doest mean they cant vote.
The most compelling argument, for me, reinforcing the idea that prisoners should have the right to vote is that social conditions play a significant role in whether someone ends up in prison. To this extent, prisoners are the very people who should have the right to vote, in order to rectify the social situation which contributed to their crime and subsequent imprisonment.
Either the right to vote is an inalienable human right or it is not. If it is inalienable then all should vote, regardless of status (e.g. mental state, gender, occupation, or age). Logically following that prisoners should be able to vote as should children and the mentally ill. In addition, inalienable would also mean it can not be repudiated. That is, if you have the right to vote you have to exercise it. This would mean that not voting would be illegal.
If however, you make exceptions in the inalienability of this right then we have a problem, it is no longer inalienable. The exceptions invites perversion, and an opportunity for removing the right for sections of society not popular with the majority. If the majority removed the right from the minority, and the process was repeated several times there would be a selection effect which would render a democracy to a puppet state. For example, exceptions create a precedent that would make it perfectly possible for a majority political party to remove the right to vote from those who voted for the opposition.
If in a hypothetical society 90% of the population is imprisoned. The 10% out of prison who dictated rules to the 10%. That is not democracy.
My view is that everyone should vote, and no one should be excluded or allowed to reject the voting right, okay the under fives might chew the ballot paper but its still vote. If however, we choose to limit the enfranchisement then we have to accept that we don’t really live in a democracy (The toddler voting might seem a bit excessive, but you don’t have to eat school dinners, nor have your future decided by grown-ups).
When I started writing this I didn’t want prisoners to vote. Sadly I have defeated myself with my own logic. It will be interesting to see how a 3 month old baby would choose to vote.
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John, I agree with your arguements for prisoner’s rights to vote, and we are working to achieve this in Nigeria. As you may know, prisoners in Ghana voted for the first time, I think, in the last election and a Kenyan Hight Court just ruled that prisoners have the rights to vote. I would like to work with you and other interested persons to achieve this in Nigeria in 2015’s general elections. I believe that they have the right to vote and that advantages for voting are far more that disadvantages, and we can choose the principle of the greater good here.
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This entry was posted on May 18, 2011 by Constitutional Law Group in Human rights, UK Parliament and tagged ECHR, Prisoners' Rights.
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