We mustn’t give in to foreign court on votes for prisoners
IT EMERGED yesterday that David Lidington, the Justice Secretary, has simply given up on the 12-year battle fought by both Labour and previous Conservative governments against a demand from the European Court of Human Rights that prisoners should be allowed to vote.
David Cameron once said that he felt so strongly about the thought of prisoners voting that it made him “physically ill”. For 12 years we have sent the ECHR judges the same message: whatever you say and however many times you say it, you will get nowhere.
It is a fundamental plank of our society that individuals give up their right to vote when they are imprisoned for their crimes.
But now, according to a memo reportedly sent to other ministers last week, the Justice Secretary is said to be proposing to have us prostrate ourselves before the Strasbourg court and simply give up the fight. Under his plan, prisoners serving a sentence of less than a year who are on day release will be allowed to go back to their home constituency to vote.
BE CLEAR what this is about. The issue of prisoners’ rights is vital but behind it lies another fight by the human rights lobby. The argument over the ECHR ruling – indeed, the same applies to any of its rulings – is between those who believe that the will of the people is less important than the idea that foreign judges should be able to tell Britain how to behave.
You hardly need me to point out the parallel here. The ECHR is not part of the EU but the issue is almost identical to the issue underlying Brexit – that we, and we alone, should be able to decide how we are governed.
We voted to leave the EU to take back control of our laws. And rightly the Government is insisting that once we leave the EU, the European Court of Justice – the EU’s highest court – will have no power to force the British government or British courts to do anything. This will be one of the key areas in our Brexit negotiations.
But because the EU and ECHR are different, we will remain signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights – and thus we