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Voting by Prisoners

It does help me, and I think that it helps the House as well. What Britain was seeking to do was enshrine throughout the rest of Europe the freedoms that we had enjoyed for centuries in this country from the Bill of Rights onwards. That was Churchill's vision. Even in Britain, rights have been won thanks to the Court. The Attorney-General cited a couple of instances in which he agreed with the Court and disagreed with the previous Labour Government. Successive Governments, for instance, held out against allowing gays in the military in this country. It was the European Court that insisted in 1999, and today I am not aware of a single Member of Parliament who thinks that someone should be sacked from the Army, the Navy or the RAF solely by virtue of his or her sexuality. Likewise, it was as a result of the Court's judgment in the case brought by Denise Matthews against the Labour Government that Gibraltarians were granted the right to vote in elections to the European Parliament in 2004. So Labour supports the European Court, but as a critical friend. We have heard several criticisms of the Court's operation today. Let me add a couple. The court has a backlog of many thousands of cases, which would take 47 years to complete. Its members are not all equally qualified. It has no effective triage system to filter out vexatious claims of little or no merit. There is no requirement for an appellant to seek leave to appeal to the Court from a national court in the first place, which is something that we might want to consider. Most important, some of its members believe that they are, or should be, a supreme court for all the contracting parties—to which I simply say that they are wrong. Every high or supreme court in Europe has a democratic safety valve which allows its duly elected Assembly or Parliament to overrule the courts in certain circumstances. In the UK, that is our parliamentary sovereignty. We firmly contend that the 1688 Bill of Rights was right to assert that proceedings in Parliament cannot be"““impeached or questioned in any Court or Place””."