Voting Eligibility (Prisoners)

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is the problem; at the moment, we have a Court that is drowning in hundreds of thousands of cases in areas that the originators of the convention would never have considered relevant to what they were creating. That has taken the judges in Strasbourg away from the fundamental principles that they are supposed to be there to protect, so I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

The European convention on human rights was set up in the aftermath of the second world war to ensure that the horrors of Nazi Germany never happened again. It was never the intention of its framers to give Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess the vote. Does not that make it clear that there is a difference between the convention and the Court? That is why Parliament will have a moral mandate to defy the Court.

[Chris Grayling]

I really believe that is the central issue, which is why I feel so passionately that we need to reform the system, which has moved a long way from the noble motives of its conservative creators, who were trying to address some of the appalling situations that people in Europe found themselves in at the time. It was not about whether prisoners had the right to vote; it was about people being put in mental hospitals for the rest of their lives without trial as an excuse for taking them out of the political process. That is the kind of thing we should be fighting.