HR act

[Loosehead]

OK with the recent news that the ECHR has decreed that prisoners can vote I got to wondering when it has ever been used other than to help out criminal lowlives or criminal lowlives about to become such. I welcome any examples you can provide. thanks

[WShee9]

It has,nt Loosie....criminals human rights come a long way before non-criminals rights...sad but true...

[rov1200]

All the minister in the house kept saying was we signed up to the treaty 60 years ago and to abide by the law we had to accept their findings. You would think a bad law should be changed at all costs. The government can't even agree if the whole of the prison votes falls within that voting boundary. Therefore you could have 2000 inmates voting for Labour in that constituency massively affecting the MP selected.

[jake-the-peg]

Human rights are most commonly abused in the relationship between the individual and the state.

This means that they are most commonly relevant in the justice system - which makes it easy for you to simply brand them all as "criminal low lives" presumably confident that you'd personally never be wronly accused and find yourself on the receiving end - I can just imagine the squeels of outrage if you were!

However that's not always the case - Human Rights legislation has been very important in the current tolenace of assisted suicide and has also in the conditions of publically run care homes.

Regrettably it was rules not to cover the conditions in private care homes

[bednobs]

i wondered whether prisoners actually really cared about voting anyway? Out of all the things that could be taken away in prison, the ability to vote is surely the smallest of them?

[jake-the-peg]

Further to this it seems that this story has been rather misrepresented in the media.

The Judgement is not that All Prisoners must be given the right to vote. Indeed in many European country many prisoners are not entitled to vote.

The point is that in the UK the sanction is indiscriminate and automatically applied regardless of the nature of the offence.

It is the indiscriminate nature that has been ruled against. It would be perfectly possible for prisoners to be denied the right to vote if their sentence was over a year for example.

More devil in the details here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11676456

[Haggisdj]

Come election time, I wonder if they'll get canvassed?