Disenfranchisement as punishment : European Court of Human Rights, UK and Canadian responses to prisoner voting

Whether or not prisoners should enjoy the right to vote is a controversial subject in many democracies but perhaps none more so than in the UK. The issue pits the civil and political rights of some of the most unpopular citizens within society against the strong desire of Parliament to restrict and to limit those rights. In this paper, we examine how the UK has for a decade been able to avoid responding to decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), domestic courts, and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), that a complete ban on prisoner voting rights contravenes the First Protocol to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). Much of the debate has focused on Parliamentary resistance to the rulings, but we argue that the European and domestic courts bear a good deal of responsibility for this state of affairs.