The Civil Rights of Prisoners in the UK - Essay Example

Forgoing the Right to Vote: The Civil Rights of Prisoners in the United Kingdom Introduction Several countries limit prisoners’ right to vote in elections. For instance, convicted inmates are automatically prohibited to vote in Hungary, Romania, Estonia, Armenia and the United Kingdom. The issue is specifically questionable in the United Kingdom.1 The British High Court in April 2001 dismissed a case filed by John Hirst, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for manslaughter and who disputed that the prohibition on inmates voting was contrary to the Human Rights Act 1998.2 The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in March 2004 declared that the UK government was in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights; the Grand Chamber of the European Court dismissed the appeal of the British government in October 2005. But as of June 2006 there has been no revision in UK law on the issue.3 Once the European Court of Human Rights ultimately rejected the British government’s inexcusable appeal in the John Hirst’s case they granted the New Labour Government with a rare and genuine opportunity to implement their much proclaimed policy of political and social inclusion.4 Until Hirst’s case, whenever any person in the United Kingdom is sentenced to imprisonment they sacrificed more than their rights or freedom. They also sacrificed their right to vote and along with it their position as citizens. Convicts remain the last primary group to be prohibited from the electorate.5 Consequently their welfare is mostly overlooked and politicians have little motivation to pay comprehensive and knowledgeable attention in penal policy.6 The electoral disentitlement of inmates is a remnant of the nineteenth century which plays no contemporary role and which is in conflict with the declared commitment of the government to social and political inclusion.7 The Debate over Prisoners’ Right to Vote Sentenced inmates in the UK have been stripped of their right to vote ever since the Forfeiture Act of 1870, immediately after the vote was bestowed upon multitudes of working class men in urban areas and after transportation was closed down as a court ruling.8 The forfeiture was brought in by a privileged class resolute to shun impoverished offenders away from the ballot box. In the past, the moving of lawbreakers and a quite controlled authorisation had implied that right to vote for inmates had never been a problem.9 The beginnings of the electoral banning of inmates can be traced back from the ancient concept of ‘civic death’, a sentence involving the forfeiture of citizenship rights.10 The prohibition reveals outdated and negative concepts of social segregation and elitism, rather than contemporary goals of social inclusion and resettlement.11 Roughly two centuries after the closing down of transportation as a court ruling, prisoners continue to confront a type of banishment from society and the democratic practice. Prohibiting inmates from voting is neither a preventive nor a useful punishment.12 Banning a sentenced inmate from voting does not have a realistic explanation in the way that confiscating the driving licence of a reckless driver does. The removal of voting rights should merely be a response to exploitation of the electoral procedure, not to other types of offences.13 There are no intrinsic explanations why inmates are morally inappropriate to be accepted in the electorate.14 The electoral banning of inmates further alienates and excludes thousands of individuals who are by now amongst the most discriminated, marginalised, and excluded people in the UK. Due to the ethnic aspect of incarceration in Wales and England, Black males are more prone than White males to be prohibited from voting, scarcely an element of a just society.15 Including prisoners in the electorate would help guarantee that what occurs in penal complexes is not overlooked by those in Parliament. The UK has a minority status among European countries in involuntarily suppressing all sentenced inmates.16 The European Court ruled in opposition to the UK for the reason that the prohibition applied to all inmates, regardless of their crime or duration of sentence and at present the Government seems ready to launch some form of weak reform by permitting the vote to possibly only especially temporary inmates; that would be a wrong move.17 The Right to Vote and Human Rights Inmates imprisoned within UK penitentiaries who have been sentenced immediately after conviction for an offence are currently prohibited from voting at elections all over the United Kingdom.18 This prohibition is presently determined by section 3 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 and associated ruling. However, as previously mentioned, ECtHR in 2004 took into account the case of John Hirst.19 It discovered consensually that the British government was in breach of Protocol 1’s Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which ascertains voting rights. The group of judges that reviewed the case involved a British judge, Sir Nicolas Bratza.20 The ECtHR decided that: “The fact that a convicted prisoner is deprived of his liberty does not mean that he loses the protection of other fundamental rights in the Convention”21, and claimed that voting rights should be understood as: “… the indispensable foundation of a democratic system”22 (Goodwin-Gill 2006, 66). The British government asserted that the prohibition validated to deter crime and punish criminals and to broaden respect for the law and civic duty. Nonetheless, the ECtHR did not find any evidence to substantiate the assertion that suppression prevented crime and regarded that the enforcement of a blanket punishment on every inmate irrespective of his/her offence or individual conditions suggested no logical connection between the criminal and the punishment.23 The ECtHR also claimed that dispossession of the vote actually runs against the rehabilitation of the lawbreaker as a decent and law-abiding citizen and weakens the legitimacy of the law as obtained from a parliament which the population as a whole elects into authority.24 The ECtHR was especially bothered by the arbitrary manner in which a vast category of people are suppressed in the UK. It emphasised that the prohibition on voting applies to every inmate regardless of the duration of his/her sentence or the severity or nature of their crime, and found out that its actual implication relies subjectively on the phase during which the inmate happen to serve his/her sentence.25 It found out that there is no evidence that the UK parliament has ever pursued to evaluate the comparativeness of the prohibition as it influences sentenced inmates.26 It condemned countries where constraints on voting rights obtain fundamentally from submissive and unquestioning obedience to a historical practice, which can be viewed to be the situation in the UK. The UK government, in 2005, appealed to the ECtHR’s Grand Chamber, claiming that prisoners have sacrificed their right to vote or right to have an influence in how the country is ruled.27 As previously mentioned, the Grand Chamber, in October 2005, dismissed the appeal of the UK government by a majority of 12 to 5, stressing yet again, the apparent inappropriateness with the ECHR of a wholesale ban on voting rights of prisoners. The ruling declared forcefully that28 (Shelton 2008, 246): There is no question, therefore, that a prisoner forfeits his Convention rights merely because of his status as a person detained following conviction. Nor is there any place under the Convention system, where tolerance and broadmindedness are the acknowledged hallmarks of democratic society, for automatic disenfranchisement based purely on what might offend public opinion.29 After the ruling of the Grand Chamber, the government ruled a year to instigate a consultation procedure to verify how best to put into effect the ruling. The government declared that it would accomplish the consultation procedure and suggest a legislative solution by 2008.30 It eventually proclaimed that, in truth, the consultation procedure would be a two-phase procedure but did not specify when the next phase would begin.31 The government, in April 2009, at last made public the discoveries of the consultation’s first phase. The Aire Centre, UNLOCK, Liberty, and The Prison Reform Trust and allied groups have condemned this practice as having been critically inconsistent due to the fact that the consultation paper articulated objection about any inmates voting and did not wrote it in its list of potential alternatives, on which beliefs were being asked for, all inmates being permitted to vote.32 It considered instead the alternative, stated illegal by ECtHR, or sustaining the blanket prohibition. Nonetheless, the consultation results showed that, in spite of the defective procedure, all inmates being permitted to vote was supported by almost half the participants.33 Merely a quarter of participants supported the government’s favour of an absolute ban. Simultaneously, the government made public its second phase consultation document. This for the first time hesitantly recognised the necessity to terminate the UK’s wholesale ban and took perspectives on how this must be accomplished. Initiating the four alternatives of the consultation for including inmates, Justice Minister Michael Wills, stated (Winnett & Whitehead 2009, para 12)34: The government has made it clear that it disagreed with the European Court of Human Rights ruling. However the result of the ruling is that some degree of voting being extended to some serving prisoners is unavoidable.35 The alternative of all convicted inmates being included was once again not considered. This extended consultation ran for six months, from April to September 2009.36 Conclusions The limitation and guideline of political activities are not issues normally encompassed by written rules. Each specific claim by a sentenced inmate of his/her political rights and privileges has been addressed with on an informal basis, with each ruling diverging considerable not just from detention centre to detention centre but from prisoner to prisoner within a specific institution. Thus, it is not possible to counsel inmates of their political privileges, at least with regard to what forms of language and other political action may be accepted at any specific time in any detention centre. The UK is basically too distant from a rule of law in penal system to be capable of accomplishing that. Disenfranchisement has a lasting detrimental impact on people, influencing their sentiments about the worth of their own lives and their perception of their immediate environment. One of the objectives of the criminal justice system must be rehabilitation, which suggests that the UK government should help ex-convicts in discovering the importance and worth of their own life, the essence of belonging to a community, and the importance of voting and having an influence in selecting the people who preside over their community. UK’s disenfranchisement rule appears to be unfavourable in that regard. In order to encourage public order and safety, it is important that UK’s criminal justice system keeps on looking for efficient means to rehabilitate lawbreakers instead of simply detaining them in penal complex. Criminal justice policies and sentencing regulations must promote attempts that improve relationships in the community after individuals are released from prison and reintegrated into the society. Restoring voting rights is one such means to grant ex-convicts a say in their community and assist them in continuing to become more involved in their community. Policymakers must explore the understanding of the existing policy and take into account integrating a constitutional revision on the ballot to permit electors to advocate automatic reinstatement of the right to vote upon completion of sentence. If it is impossible, then policymakers should reassess the existing application procedure, provided the trimmed down number of requests and successful restoration of rights since the policy reform. Civil liberties and voting campaigners also have to carry out voter and public education programme concerning the process of restoration. Numerous of the participants in the consultation process were unaware of the procedure to request to get their right to vote reinstated, and there are those who even thought that there was no procedure to request for reinstatement of their civil liberties.37 Accurate information is fundamental to facilitate entitled people in completing the procedure, so supporters should strive to update offenders about the application procedure so they are informed about the requirements and its procedure.38 It is also crucial that parole officials are well-informed about the procedure so they can educate parolees of the compulsory procedures as they are getting ready to be discharged from parole. Election authorities in the UK must also be educated and informed about the entitlement qualifications so they can properly deal with concerns from applicants, and also guide those who are not entitled to the appropriate place to initiate the request procedure. References Cheney, D. & Leech, M. (2002) Prison Handbook, UK: Waterside Press. Goodwin-Gill, G. S. (2006) Inter-Parliamentary Union (January 2006) Free and Fair Elections, Inter-Parliamentary Union. Great Britain. Dept. for Constitutional Affairs, European Court of Human Rights (2006) Voting rights of convicted prisoners detained within the United Kingdom: the UK Governments response to the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights judgment in the case of Hirst v. The United Kingdom, UK: Deparment for Constitutional Affairs. Lazarus, L. (2004) Contrasting Prisoners Rights: A Comparative Examination of Germany and England, UK : Oxford University Press. Ministry of Justice. (2009) Voting Rights of Convicted Prisoners Detained within the United Kingdom, Consultation Paper CP6/09 , 10-50. Shelton, D. (2008) Regional Protection of Human Rights Pack, UK: Oxford University Press. Watt, B. (2006) UK Election Law: A Critical Examination, UK: Routledge-Cavendish . Winnett, R. & Whitehead, T. (2009) Prisoners to get right to vote after 140 years following European ruling, Telegraph.co.uk , http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5126647/Prisoners-to-get-right-to-vote-after-140-years-following-European-ruling.html. Read More