Rights inside

This evening the UK House of Commons is debating prisoners’ voting rights. The position used to be that while you were in prison you couldn’t vote. Simple.

Then a prisoner took the Government to the European Court of Human Rights, saying his rights were breached in removing his vote.

The House is likely to vote that only those prisoners in for a short stay and for certain minor offences will be allowed the vote, and the UK will probably have to pay a fine for not doing as it is told.

I can’t get terribly excited about the main issue: prison as a punishment is there to deter the guilty from doing it again and to deter others from committing the crime. I simply cannot imagine someone out to commit, say, an armed robbery being stopped by a friend saying ‘Watch out: if you’re caught you won’t be able to vote in the forthcoming elections.’ Most people don’t bother to vote anyway and most prisoners won’t bother. Another purpose of prison is to rehabilitate prisoners – not that we are very good at that, and what could be a better way of making them feel part of society than letting them choose who their leaders are?

Let them vote, they’re probably no less capable of understanding the issues than other people.

And the debate misses the important point: Britain and its people had no say in this. We are having to obey a law imposed by unelected judges from other countries. This is the first contentious edict from the human rights act I can remember even going before Parliament and even now the Government doesn’t promise to follow Parliament’s decision. What we need to do, all of us, is to subscribe to the principles of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights but have laws in Britain approved by the British Parliament, and those in Germany approved by the German one.

But they’re not even discussing that.