The Scottish Tories don’t mean to be the way they are. Sometimes they just can’t help it. They are being that way again over plans to let some prisoners vote in the forthcoming Scottish parliament elections. I am not convinced those elections should be going ahead at all in the middle of a pandemic but, if they are to, there are good reasons for prisoners to be enfranchised.
The Tories intend to force a vote at Holyrood on Wednesday against allowing those serving custodial sentences of less than 12 months to participate in the May 6 election. MSPs voted last February to extend the franchise in order to comply with a series of judgments from the European Court of Human Rights, beginning with 2005’s Hirst v United Kingdom (No 2). In Hirst, the court ruled that a blanket ban on prisoner voting was disproportionate in that ‘it strips of their Convention right to vote a significant category of persons and it does so in a way which is indiscriminate’.
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