The right to vote by prisoners

On the 22nd May 2012, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered a watershed judgment on the right to vote by a prisoner. The applicant alleged that his disenfranchisement following his criminal conviction was incompatible with his right to vote. On 2nd September 1999, after a violent family dispute, the applicant killed his wife and injured one of his sons. He was arrested the following day, found the applicant guilty of all the charges and the Court noted that he should be sentenced to life imprisonment. However, because the summary procedure had been used, he sentenced the applicant to thirty years imprisonment and a lifetime ban from public office.

Consequent to these findings and the convictions, on the 2nd April 2003 the electoral committee deleted the applicant’s name from the electoral roll. On appeal, it was pointed out that, where every person sentenced to imprisonment was divested of the right to vote, with no assessment of the competing interests or the proportionality of the measure, in Italian law the impugned measure, was applied only where the offence was punishable with a particularly heavy sentence including life imprisonment. The court found that the automatic aspect of the application of the voting ban to any custodial sentence was lacking in the applicant’s case. The appeal was consequently dismissed.

The applicant appealed on points of law, alleging, inter alia, that his disenfranchisement was a consequence of the ancillary penalty banning him from public office (which was itself the result of the main penalty imposed on him). In his view, the impugned ban had nothing to do with the offence committed and the courts had no power to decide to apply such a measure. This appeal too was dismissed. In the Italian legal system a ban from public office is an ancillary penalty, which entails forfeiture of the right to vote and for which express provision is made by law in connection with a series of specific offences, irrespective of the duration of the sentence imposed.

The United Kingdom was invited to make submissions, as it had, notwithstanding a previous ruling by the European Court on Human Rights, not complied with a judgment of the court. The UK was required to introduce legislation to enable prisoners to vote by a previous decision of the Grand Chamber in Greens and MT v UK. This case followed Hirst (no 2) v UK where the Court initially called on the UK to take action on prisoner voting rights. The European Court of Human Rights has said individual governments can decide how to implement a ban on convicted prisoners voting. The judgement means the UK will be able to decide for itself how to resolve the long-standing row over votes for inmates.

In a landmark judgment, the court found that an Italian prisoner’s rights had not been breached. In a summary of its judgement, the court said it “accepted the [UK] government’s argument that each state has a wide discretion as to how it regulates the ban”, both in terms of the type of offences covered and whether the matter should be defined in law or left for judges to decide. The judgment means that states cannot impose a blanket ban of prisoners’ right to vote.


(2012-06-06/gazettebw)