Voting by Prisoners
Debate between Yasmin Qureshi and Rehman Chishti(13 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)
The debate is about whether prisoners should have the right to vote, but it seems to have been turned into an opportunity to bash the European Court of Human Rights, the convention and the Human Rights Act. That is completely unfair, because over the past 30 or 40 years the European Court has been making judgments in cases where it is now accepted that the correct decision was made.
We have heard constant references to Lord Hoffmann’s opinion. When I was training to be a barrister, I was told that citing dissenting and minority opinions of judges is the last refuge of a desperate advocate. Let me tell the House a little about Lord Hoffmann’s background, and let us see whether, by the end of that, people still believe that he is the man by whom one should judge whether the European Court is right or wrong.
I shall start with the case of Peter Sutcliffe. His last victim’s mother sued the police over the negligence of the investigation that led to her daughter’s death, but the House of Lords decided that the police and local authorities could not be sued for negligence in any actions that they took. That principle existed in our courts for 10 years until, eventually, it was challenged, and, believe it or not, it was the European Court in Strasbourg that said, “No, local authorities and public bodies can be responsible and can be sued when there has been a dereliction of duty.”
Cases of children who have been abused or not taken into care by local authorities—
