Conference - Challenges to Implementing the Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights: Dialogues on Prisoner Voting Rights

9:00am - 6:30pm / Friday 30th October 2015
Type: Conference / Category: Department
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The effectiveness of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is dependent on how readily its judgments are executed by the Contracting Parties. This workshop will look at one of the most controversial confrontations between the ECtHR and the Contracting Parties in its history: the prisoners’ voting saga. In 2005, the ECtHR ruled that a British blanket ban on prisoners’ voting violates Article 3 of Protocol 1 to the Convention. To date, this judgment has not been executed and this forced the ECtHR to deliver a pilot judgment confirming Hirst No 2. This subsequent judgment created a further barrage of public outcry in the UK and has also not yet been executed. In a more recent case of Anchugov and Gladkov v. Russia a similar blanket constitutional ban in Russia was found incompatible with the Convention; it too was not implemented by the respondent party. Simultaneously, Austria and Ireland, in contrast to Russia and the United Kingdom, passed laws to enfranchise their prisoners with minimal controversy or fanfare. This project aims to assess why the issue of prisoner enfranchisement is so controversial in some States while it passes unnoticed in others. This workshop aims to explore acceptable ways of implementing of prisoners’ voting judgments in Russia and the United Kingdom. The presentations at the workshop will explore the possibility of facilitating national sovereign decision-making and national traditions within the Strasbourg supervisory mechanism. The participants will focus their addresses on the roots of the issue and the possible solutions to the prisoners’ voting crisis. This workshop brings together academics, legal practitioners and policy makers from Russia, the United Kingdom, Norway, Ireland and the Council of Europe.

A link to the website with the full programme will be available soon.