Prisoners’ Voting Rights and the Long-Lasting Political Resistance to the Implementation of the European Court of Human Rights’ Judgments

In 2005 the ECtHR ruled that the UK was in breach of Art. 3 of Protocol 1 (Hirst v. The United Kingdom (no. 2)) because of the blanket ban on prisoners’ voting (established in Section 3 of the Representation of the People Act 1983). The issue remained unresolved for over a decade. What could seem a simple matter of executing one of the not-so-many judgments against the UK, simply by making appropriate amendments to the domestic legislation, turned into a real “political war” over the proper allocation of competences between the ECtHR and the UK. The contribution looks at the period of time 2005–2018, analysing the political and jurisprudential debate played both at national and conventional levels, until the moment when the “war” between the ECtHR and the UK has (quietly) come to an end. The paper looks closely at the Government proposals in order to demonstrate that the administrative measures (accepted by the CoE) fail to respond adequately to the 2005 judgment (and to other clone cases). At the end, the UK has won the war because it has minimised the political and the material costs of compliance.