MPs in the Commons will today debate the motion put down by David Davis, Jack Straw and others (main business, over half way down the order paper), which is in these terms: That this House notes the ruling of the [...]
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled today that an Italian prisoner's rights were breached where he was sentenced to prison for life, and as a result lost the right to vote indefinitely. The ECtHR's ruling in Scoppola v [...]
Today has seen the failure in the Court of Appeal of the judicial review in Chester v Justice Secretary, a case that always was hopeless. More importantly, the government intends to give the vote to all prisoners serving less than [...]
I'm agnostic about whether prisoners should be allowed to vote - I can see the rehabilitation argument, up to a point, but I understand the view that disfranchisement (as the legislation puts it) is part of punishment, too. So if [...]
I spoke to Charon QC earlier about the issue of prisoners' voting, following Joshua Rozenberg's recent Guardian Law piece on the subject and the guest post on his blog by John Hirst. We give a bit of background about the [...]
It's always worth listening to Michael Howard's views on constitutional and legal matters - he was one of the first Conservatives to speak about "repatriating" policies from the EU as I recall, an idea that was considered extreme at the [...]
I'd entirely missed Lord Hoffmann's recent speech about the European Court of Human Rights: thanks to Afua Hirsch for drawing attention to it. In my view this is a brave and important speech, and I applaud him.Let me stress that [...]
This weekend Charon interviewed John Hirst of Prison Law Inside Out about his experience of life in prison, his thoughts on the penal system and about his victory a couple of years ago in the European Court of Human Rights [...]
Read, here, today's fascinating and important ruling by the Scottish Registration Appeals Court, which, on a generous reading of the law thinks it really is the Court of Session, on the compatibility of the Scottish elections with the Convention rights [...]