Reluctantly Restoring Rights: Responding to the Prisoner's Right to Vote

The UK government's defeat before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) 1 in Hirst v United Kingdom (No. 2) with respect to its legislation disenfranchising convicted prisoners, and the government's recaltriant response to that finding, has highlighted the various political and legal views on the retention of prisoners’ rights. The disenfranchisement of prisoners obviously raises issues of participative democracy, but whether convicted prisoners have the right to vote is also central to the question of whether prisoners retain their basic human rights upon incarceration or whether imprisonment inevitably deprives them of such rights. Although there are a number of democratic and legal reasons to support the prisoner's right to vote, 2 this paper will concentrate on the general assumption that prisoners retain their basic rights and that, as with the enjoyment of other democratic rights, the right to vote should not be lost on incarceration....