Call to lift bar on prisoners voting

Guardian, UK

Press Association
Monday April 4, 2005

A national campaign launched today to give prisoners voting rights
has won high-level political backing.

Former Tory home secretary Douglas Hurd and the Liberal Democrat
president, Simon Hughes, are supporting the Barred from Voting
campaign, which is demanding a review of 135-year-old laws stripping
inmates of their voting rights.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, which is jointly
running the campaign with ex-offenders’ organisation Unlock, said:
“People are sent to prison to lose their liberty not their identity.

“Prison has an important job to do to prevent the next victim and
release people less, not more likely, to offend again. “Prisoners
should be given every opportunity to pay back for what they have done,
take responsibility for their lives and make plans for effective
resettlement and this should include maintaining their right to
vote. It’s time to stop pretending that people in prison don’t exist.”

Campaigners said the law was a relic from the 19th century – dating
to the 1870 Forfeiture Act – which is based on the notion of civic
death, a punishment that involves the withdrawal of citizenship rights.

The European Court of Human Rights last year ruled that the ban
violated article three of the European Convention on Human Rights
after British prisoner John Hirst took a case to Strasbourg. A
government appeal against the judgement is to be heard on April 27,
with a final ruling later this year.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, was accused by his
political opponents of being “soft on crime” four weeks ago when he
backed giving the vote to all prisoners, saying: “We believe that
citizens are citizens, full stop.”

The Barred from Voting campaign is also supported by Labour peer
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Dholakia,
barrister Baroness Kennedy QC and former chief inspector of prisons
Sir David Ramsbotham.

Supporters argue that the right to vote is an “inalienable human
right” and that a voting ban does nothing to deter inmates from
crime. In fact, giving prisoners the vote would encourage them to
become responsible, law-abiding citizens, they add.

The chief executive of Unlock, Bobby Cummines, said: “Giving
prisoners the vote is a question of moral conscience, not political
conscience. If prisoners are excluded from voting then we don’t have
a democratic society, we are just paying lip service to one.

“The government must accept that prisoners remain citizens of this
country with legitimate human rights, including the right to vote.”

A campaign spokesman said only seven other European countries
automatically disenfranchise sentenced prisoners – Armenia, Bulgaria,
Czech Republic, Estonia, Luxembourg and Romania.

But Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said she was opposed to the move. “When
a judge has taken the decision that somebody’s crimes are of such an
order of magnitude that they need to be taken out of society then it
does seem perverse to hand that same person a say in how society is
governed,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

But Mr Ramsbotham said the law was anachronistic.

He said: “Prisoners remain citizens of this country. They have had
their liberty removed, that is the punishment, nothing else. They
haven’t had their citizens’ rights removed.”