The Guardian view on voting rights for prisoners

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/12/guardian-view-voting-rights-prisoners

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If the European court of human rights was really the ignorantly domineering body that anti-European demonology insists, that court would not have done what it did yesterday. In the Conservative political pandemonium, the European court is an incorrigible bunch of second-rate foreign upstarts dedicated to shackling the incomparable legal systems of Britain with alien and oppressive principles at every turn. The Strasbourg court is not beyond criticism. Yet anyone who studies its latest ruling on the denial of voting rights to convicted UK prisoners will find that this rather sensible and pragmatic judgment is seriously at odds with the caricature so widely promoted in Britain’s xenophobic press.

This caricature European human rights court would have had little hesitation in upholding the latest voting rights cases brought by 10 Scottish prisoners. It would have said that the Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European human rights convention in UK law, gave all prisoners the right to vote. It would have said that Britain’s continuing refusal to concede that right entitled prisoners to financial compensation. It would have added that the UK government was liable for the prisoners’ legal costs. And it would have opened the door for cash payouts to every other convicted prisoner in UK jails, from Rose West to Rolf Harris. All this, according to some alarmists, would have landed the British taxpayer with a bill of over £100m.

The actual European human rights court has done none of those things. A decade ago the court ruled that Britain’s blanket ban on votes for prisoners was unlawful. However, it never said all prisoners should have the vote. Instead it said “some legislative amendment” to the blanket ban was needed. It has now reiterated that the blanket ban infringes human rights law. But it has added that this finding is a sufficient remedy for the applicants, so no financial compensation to either the 10 Scottish prisoners or to any other prisoner is appropriate. Finally, the court ruled yesterday that the UK government is not liable for the prisoners’ legal costs either.

A reasonable observer would therefore say two things: first, that the European court is standing firm on its finding against the UK’s blanket ban; and, second, that the court is going out of its way not to provoke a fight. The reasonable observer would be right. And so is the court. The blanket ban is oppressive. There is nothing fundamental about a ban that few other countries apply. More broadly, prisoners are in prison as punishment, not for further punishment. The medieval idea that a prisoner suffered “civic death”, losing their property and all their other rights, has long since been superseded. Prisoners retain property and many other legal rights, not merely those in human rights law.

The UK already allows remand prisoners the right to vote. There is no good reason in either principle or practice why we should not make the amendment that the court originally called for by extending the right to some convicted prisoners too. As recently as last December a joint committee of MPs and peers, chaired by Nick Gibb MP, concluded that the blanket ban was ineffective and arbitrary, that the UK is under a binding obligation to comply with the European court’s ruling, and that voting rights should be extended to prisoners serving sentences of one year or less.

This would be a modest and decent change. It is time the government put it into law. Yesterday’s ruling is not a European judicial power grab. It is a reminder of how deep-frozen much of UK public penal thinking remains, half a century after the last judicial hangings. Nearly 50 years on from the abolition of capital punishment, one consequence is that this country still sends too many people to prison for too long. Retribution will always have a place in sentencing. But it should not be the dominant place that too much penal policy allows. Today’s politicians need to rediscover some of the civilised bravery in penal policy that their predecessors displayed so impressively.