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Voting by Prisoners

This afternoon, I feared cutting a rather lonely figure when standing up to argue that we should allow more prisoners to vote. I welcome, therefore, the support of the hon. Members for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and for Belfast East (Naomi Long), theright hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane), who opened the batting for those supporting voting rights for prisoners, and the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi). I am arguing in favour of allowing more prisoners to vote, and the purpose of the intervention that I made on the spokesman for the official Opposition, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), was to highlight the fact that a number of prisoners already do have the right to vote. People who are presenting this as a black-and-white issue, or a new departure, where, for the first time, prisoners are to be given the right to vote, are misleading the public, because we know that a group of prisoners already have the right to vote. The case that I am making is based on two simple principles. The first is that when the European Court of Human Rights finds that UK law contravenes the European convention on human rights—in other words, that UK law is unlawful—the UK Government should address that illegality. Once we start picking and choosing the laws that we believe should apply and those that we can disregard—the pick-and-mix approach, as the Attorney-General put it—where does it end? The Americans know where it ends: in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Even if the ruling makes some feel uncomfortable, what about the other rulings that the Court has made? A couple of Members have referred to those, including in the case of S and Marper, in relation to DNA, and the case of Z and others, in relation to child neglect. I would also mention the case of Al-Saadoon and Mufdhi v. the UK Government in March 2010, when our Government were criticised for failing to obtain assurances from the Iraqi authorities that those men would not face the death penalty there.