Download or read book House of Lords - House of Commons - Joint Committee on the Draft Voting Eligibility (Prisoners) Bill - HL 013 - HC 924 written by Great Britain: Parliament: Joint Committee on the Draft Voting Eligibility (Prisoners) Bill and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The report Joint Committee On The Draft Voting Eligibility (Prisoners): Report (HL 103, HC 924) discuses the Government's Voting Eligibility (Prisoners): Draft Bill (see below) which was published as a result of a decision by the European Court of Human Rights, that the UK's complete prohibition on convicted prisoners voting was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The Joint Committee on the Bill has reached the following conclusions on points of basic principle: in a democracy the vote is a right, not a privilege and should not be removed without good reason; the vote is a presumptive, not an absolute right; the vote is also a power; there is a legitimate expectation that those convicted of the most heinous crimes should be stripped of the power embodied in the right to vote; selecting the custody threshold as the unique indicator of the type of offence that is so serious as to just