Prisoner voting 'could be part of rehabilitation process', Lord McNally says
He describes complaints about cost as 'a bit of scaremongering'
Lord McNally, the Liberal Democrat justice minister, has said allowing some prisoners to vote could play a “useful part in the rehabilitation process”.
The peer was speaking in the House of Lords yesterday, after reading a statement by justice secretary Chris Grayling setting out the government’s plans on the issue.
Grayling said a draft bill on prisoner voting would contain three options. The first would ban prisoners sentenced to four years or more from voting and the second the much larger group of those sentenced to more than six months in jail.
The third option, retaining the ban on all convicted prisoners, would set the UK on collision course with the European Court of Human Rights, which insists that a blanket ban on voting by prisoners is a breach of the Convention.
Responding to a question from Lord Dholakia, Lord McNally said that while the personal views of the prime minister and justice secretary were that their should be no change in the status quo, he shared the Liberal Democrat peer’s view that “it could be possible to devise a system of enfranchisement for some prisoners that could play a useful part in the rehabilitation process”.
Lord McNally said that 41 member states of the Council of Europe gave prisoners the right to vote “to some degree or another” while only six continued with a blanket ban. These were Armenia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Russia, San Marino and the UK.
He said arguments against allowing prisoners to vote based on cost were “a bit of scaremongering”.
The justice minister added: “There have been many red herrings in regard to the methodology of prisoner voting. I suspect that it would be done by postal votes, which would not be a tremendous burden on the administration of any elections.”
Ruling on the Italian case of Scoppola in May, in which Attorney General Dominic Grieve intervened on behalf of the UK government, the Strasbourg court rejected the argument that it should rethink its ruling in Hirst that the UK’s blanket ban preventing all prisoners from voting was a violation of their human rights.