Tag Archives: prisoner voting

Opinion: Prisoner voting rights

By Tom Nicholson | Tue 11th June 2013 - 8:55 am

This week, the Supreme Court is considering the legality of the Government’s ban on prisoner voting. A majority of MPs are set against even limited suffrage for prisoners. The idea makes David Cameron “physically sick” and Jack Straw believes “those who break the law cannot make the law.”

Many supporters advance the same perfectly sound arguments, particularly from a human rights perspective. But a strong, pragmatic case for full prison enfranchisement can also be made by assessing this most populist of policies against the aims of sentencing in the criminal …

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Opinion: Prisoner voting and the rule of law

By Richard Wingfield | Tue 20th November 2012 - 11:25 am

Liberal Democrats have always been proud defenders of the rule of law. As our manifesto stated in 2010, the values of ‘fairness and the rule of law’ lie at the heart of our foreign policy. However, just as we call on other states such as Burma, Belarus and Zimbabwe to respect the rule of law, so we must be ever vigilant that there is no weakening of this fundamental principle at home. The Liberal Democrat policy on the Justice and Security Bill at conference in September was a powerful reminder to the leadership on how seriously we, as a party, take this issue.