Why Prisoners Must Get the Vote

David Cameron has described the thought of prisoners being able to vote in UK General Elections as making him 'physically ill'. No doubt a lot of people would share his disgust. The thought does not exactly fill me with joy either. Despite this, there are very important reasons why the franchise should be extended to those behind bars.

The first is based on the concept of human rights. Human rights are by definition universal. They apply to all human beings. They are non-delegable and they cannot be waived. Why not? Because you can't stop being human. The fact that you may have committed the most serious, violent criminal offence does not disqualify you from being a human. It might disqualify you from being a decent human, but it doesn't change the basic fact.

Therefore, everyone is entitled to human rights, even criminals. We accept that criminals cannot be tortured. Furthermore, we accept that prisoners are entitled to fair trials. We allow offenders to get married and to practise freedom of religion. The big question, then, is whether the right to vote should properly be seen as a 'human right'.

This is a matter of debate. It is arguable that voting should be viewed as a civil or constitutional right, extended by law by a state to its citizens. The effect of this would be to say that the North Korean Government does not violate the human rights of its people when it denies them the opportunity to elect their leaders. One would be suggesting that the North Korean Government merely violates civil or political rights.

The opposite view is that the right to elect a government is a basic human right. In support of this, it is possible to argue that without democratic freedom, a person cannot truly be 'free' at all. If one is not given the opportunity to vote in elections, one remains in a state of perpetual subjugation. The social contract an individual is born into with society involves an implicit understanding that when the government of the day takes decisions with public resources that proves to be unacceptable, that individual has the ability to replace the government. If this were not so, the social contract would be an illegitimate tool of oppression by the political classes.

It is to this view that I subscribe. The right to vote in elections should be considered to be a fundamental, unalienable human right. That is why I, like many others, find it so disturbing when I see the wishes of people in places like Zimbabwe, China, Iran, and North Korea continuously treated with contempt.

Once the right to vote in elections has been established as a human right, the case for allowing prisoners to access the ballot box is unanswerable. Public opinion is irrelevant. That is why human rights are enshrined in law. If there was no binding protection for human rights in the UK, the government of the day could pick and choose which freedoms to guarantee and which to abandon. This is plainly incompatible with the notion of 'human rights' and justifies the position of unelected judges upholding such rights in a democratic society.

The other, more practical, reason why prisoners must get the vote is cost. Every day the UK Government fails to pay prisoners who have brought claims under the European Convention on Human Rights, the taxpayer incurs serious financial penalties. Given the precarious position of the public purse, this is a mounting debt the Exchequer can ill afford. The bill for claims currently stands at £35 million. As troubling as the thought of prisoners voting is, it is arguably less problematic than the prospect of convicted offenders enriching themselves at the expense of law-abiding UK citizens.

So for these reasons, it is imperative that Parliament complies with the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights and changes the law. The UK is one of the only countries in Europe that has a blanket ban on prisoners voting. If we have any respect for human rights and the rule of law in general, we should grit our teeth and bite the bullet.