Politicians warned over prisoner voting rights
Government told it must give prisoners the right to vote in May elections or face thousands of compensation claims
Europe's human rights watchdog has warned British politicians that if they continue to exclude prisoners from the right to vote they risk undermining a crucial element of democracy.
In an exclusive article on the Guardian's law website, Thomas Hammerberg, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, says Britain is almost alone in Europe in refusing to recognise that "convicts are human beings with human rights". He warns that with elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland due in May it is "high time" the UK complied with its legal obligations. His intervention will fuel controversy around a free vote in the Commons next week on a Tory rebels' amendment to limit the right to vote to prisoners serving less than one year.
It is more than five years since the European court of human rights ruled it unlawful for prisoners to be excluded from voting in national and European elections. The Labour government failed to implement the ruling and ministers face the prospect of paying compensation to more than 2,500 prisoners who have officially complained about being unlawfully disenfranchised.
Hammerberg acknowledges the very idea that convicted criminals should have an influence on politics has stirred strong emotions in Britain: "It may be sobering to remind ourselves that democracy was once established through the idea of universal suffrage."
"Our forefathers accepted the principle that not only male persons, nobles, and those who owned property or paid taxes should have the right to vote, but everyone irrespective of their status in society. We may now feel that some of these right-holders do not deserve this possibility, but to exclude them is to undermine a crucial dimension of the very concept of democracy and human rights."
He said the ! 1948 Uni versal Declaration of Human Rights said everyone had the right to take part in the government of their country and stipulated that this should be expressed in elections based on universal and equal suffrage.
"To receive judgments on such an issue from a court in Strasbourg may be felt as a humiliation. However, the court is not an alien institution; the United Kingdom is an integral partner to its proceedings and has ratified the convention which serves as a basis for all court decisions. The UK is, of course, one of the founding members of the Council of Europe."
Hammerberg says in his experience governments may appear to be irritated by requests to take further steps to protect human rights but they tend to comply with the result that the situation is improved. "Convicts are human beings with human rights. I hope the British authorities will respect the court ruling on voting rights for prisoners. They could do that knowing that most other member states of the Council of Europe already allow prisoners to vote and this has caused no real problems and is not even an issue in these countries. With the elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland drawing near, it is high time that the UK made good on its obligations."
Ken Clarke, the justice secretary, said this week that nobody wanted to give prisoners the vote. He intended to do the minimum necessary to avoid paying large amounts in compensation and appealed to MPs not to reject the possibility of complying with the law.
"I shall ask them how are they going to explain to their constituents that at a time like this spending money on compensating prisoners for a right that they probably would not bother to exercise if we gave it to them," he said.
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