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Voting by Prisoners

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I would like to make a bit of progress and give way later. Secondly, it is not the role of the European Court of Human Rights to legislate on who gets to vote in the UK. As the President of the Court and others argued in their dissenting opinion on Hirst,"““it is essential to bear in mind that the Court is not a legislator and should be careful not to assume legislative functions.””" That is why we argued in the Grand Chamber that the Court was acting ultra vires and why we believe it is for Parliament—and Parliament alone—to legislate on this for the UK. Thirdly, the Government's proposals that prisoners sentenced to custodial sentences of less than four years should retain the vote—if indeed they still are their proposals; they might not be given what we have just heard—are far too generous and will not be acceptable to the vast majority of the British public. That is not to say that prisoners should be deprived of all their rights. Of course not—prisoners are humans. Torture and degrading treatment are repugnant. We abhor it when prisoners are treated as less than human in jails in Latin America, in Turkey or in Russia. In depriving someone of their liberty, however, the state should be able to decide that someone has also forfeited other freedoms. Prisoners retain a right to family life, as the European Court of Human Rights has rightly adjudged, but while in prison they cannot pick their children up from school or kiss them goodnight. They retain the right to freedom of expression and, for that matter, freedom of religion, but, by definition, they lose the right to freedom of assembly.