Quote ="peggy"Chris28
Why certain prisoners, why not all or none at all?'"
Because that's the whole point.
The general prinicple is in Article 3 of Protocol 1 :
Quote “The High Contracting Parties undertake to hold free elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot, under conditions which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature."'"
As the Chamber put it (a position endorsed by the majority vote of the Grand Chamber) -
Quote “The Court accepts that this is an area in which a wide margin of appreciation should be granted to the national legislature in determining whether restrictions on prisoners’ right to vote can still be justified in modern times and if so how a fair balance is to be struck. In particular, it should be for the legislature to decide whether any restriction on the right to vote should be tailored to particular offences, or offences of a particular gravity or whether, for instance, the sentencing court should be left with an overriding discretion to deprive a convicted person of his right to vote. The Court would observe that there is no evidence that the legislature in the United Kingdom has ever sought to weigh the competing interests or to assess the proportionality of the ban as it affects convicted prisoners. It cannot accept however that an absolute bar on voting by any serving prisoner in any circumstances falls within an acceptable margin of appreciation. The applicant in the present case lost his right to vote as the result of the imposition of an automatic and blanket restriction on convicted prisoners’ franchise and may therefore claim to be a victim of the measure. The Court cannot speculate as to whether the applicant would still have been deprived of the vote even if a more limited restriction on the right of prisoners to vote had been imposed, which was such as to comply with the requirements of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1.”
'"
So, there is no reason (and none was stated) as to why a decision to disenfranchise in any given case should not be made, it was the arbitrary nature of the blanket ban which fell foul, not the general principle. The UK can legislate to restrict prisoners' voting rights, but the existing 1983 blanket ban was held incompatible as it does not in any way take into consideration the hugely varying individual circumstances.
