Human rights don’t count if they cost votes

Human rights don’t count if they cost votes



By Sam Leith
08.02.10

Prisoners in this country — a situation that is rare in liberal democracies — are not allowed to cast votes in elections. You may think this is a good thing, and you may think this is a bad thing. But it is, beyond question, an unlawful thing.

Campaigning bodies have warned that if Britain's 83,000 prisoners aren't allowed to vote in the next general election, they will be within their rights to sue. They'll have a case. And at a time when frontline public services are being cut to pay interest on money we've had to bail out the bankers with, we're entitled to wonder whether paying lawyers to defend the status quo is a good use of public money.

In 2005, the European Court at Strasbourg ruled that our blanket refusal to give prisoners the vote violated the European Convention on Human Rights. Our government's appeal failed.

So New Labour — fearless champion of human rights, except when they might cost votes — stuck its fingers in its ears and started singing: “LA LA LA, I can't HEAR you!” The Lib-Dem peer Lord Lester calls the position “a gross violation of a binding judgment”.

Certainly, it seems odd. The Government is deliberately breaking the law — or, at least, is resisting it with every means in its power — in order to prevent, um, lawbreakers being allowed to have a say in who the, um, government is.

This is the policy equivalent of one of those MC Escher staircases with all the people walking upside downside and nobody going anywhere. You look at it, and it seems to make sense, but then as you start to follow the staircase around with your eyes you feel a migraine coming on.

It also seems weirdly indicative of what's wrong with the Government, of whom a senior member lately appealed to “the court of public opinion”. As a flagship part of its legislative programme, New Labour set about binding our judiciary to implement European human rights law. But now, when it says something that they don't like, they ignore it.

It's hard not to conclude that this government — a government stuffed as never before with lawyers, and one that for its first decade in office chucked new laws onto the statute books at the rate of one per day — nevertheless doesn't really get what the law is for.

It seems to think of the law — like a number of other institutions such as parliamentary scrutiny, Cabinet decision-making, and United Nations resolutions — as essentially an administrative convenience, for optional use as and when it might be helpful.

That seems a good argument in itself for getting prisoners involved in the political process. With first-hand experience of just how crunchy the law can be, they can give Labour ministers the basic lessons in it they need.