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Voting by Prisoners

The last Labour Government spent five years dithering over this issue. They did nothing. As with so much else, the Labour party left it to the incoming coalition Government to sort out the mess. Therefore, the one thing on which we can all be agreed is that this is an issue on which we need to take no lessons from those on the Opposition Benches. They had five years to sort out this problem while in government and simply failed to do anything. The European Court of Human Rights has not said that we have an obligation to give every prisoner the vote. What the ECHR did find was that a blanket ban was not proportionate, that"““the principle of proportionality requires a discernible and sufficient link between the sanction and the conduct and circumstances of the individual concerned””" and that"““in sentencing the criminal courts in England and Wales made no reference to disenfranchisement and it was not apparent that there was any direct link between the facts of any individual case and the removal of the right to vote.””" I think we should seek to address those issues. It would be wrong simply to put two fingers up to the Court because we did not like the implications of its judgment. There is a perfectly straightforward way forward that deals with the ECHR points and meets the collective view of this House that prisoners should lose the right to vote while in detention, because it has always been agreed that if one commits a serious crime, one should lose the right to have a say in how one is governed. The way forward lies in the ECHR's judgment in Hirst, but it also lies in the ECHR's judgments in cases involving other European countries: Frodl v. Austria and Scoppola v. Italy, the No. 3 case. In Frodl, the Court said that"““the sanction of disenfranchisement...should preferably be imposed not by operation of a law but by the decision of a judge following judicial proceedings””." In Scoppola, the Court held"““that a decision on disenfranchisement should be taken by a court and should be duly reasoned.””" When a judge sentences an individual to prison the court has to make a number of decisions: on the length of imprisonment; on whether terms for individual offences should run concurrently or consecutively; and on whether part of the sentence should be suspended. Depending on the exact nature of the offence, the court will also have to put its mind to a number of other possible consequential orders. I see no reason why a judge should not inform the defendant when sentencing that, in addition to their term of imprisonment and as a consequence of their conduct, they would, as part of their punishment, be disfranchised in regional, national and European elections for a specific period of time. As with every other aspect of sentencing, one would expect the Lord Chief Justice, senior judges and the Supreme Court to issue sentencing guidelines. Crown Court judges and magistrates are given sentencing guidelines on every other aspect of sentencing, so I see no reason why it should not be possible to devise effective sentencing guidelines on disfranchisement that start from the general premise that those who go to prison will lose the vote while they are in prison.