"Civic Death Penalty" abolished in Europe.

Via Opinio Juris and ComparativeLawBlog.

The pointedly-named "civic death" penalty refers to the permanent disenfranchisement of citizens upon conviction. This is a huge problem in the United States, where 1 in 50 adults (4.6m) have been permanently disenfranchised as a result of a felony conviction, 73% of whom are no longer in prison. (The disenfranchisement rate among black adult males is 13x the national average; this bloc makes up over 1/3 of the total disenfranchised population.) Unfortunately, the civic death penalty was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1974 (Richardson v. Ramirez), so it's probably not going anywhere until the statistics get so out-of-hand that the several States start taking action, and/or we once again assume global recognition as a lone depriver of human rights, like we had in the juvenile death penalty context before Roper v. Simmons.

Last week, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights made a bold and controversial step in the latter direction. In Hirst v. United Kingdom, it ruled that the civic death penalty is at odds with the European Convention on Human Rights, notwithstanding the fact that over 250 countries restrict the voting rights of present or former convicts, and over the dissent of five Justices. (Press release here.)

The provision imposes a blanket restriction on all convicted prisoners in prison. It applies automatically to such prisoners, irrespective of the length of their sentence and irrespective of the nature or gravity of their offence and their individual circumstances. Such a general, automatic and indiscriminate restriction on a vitally important Convention right must be seen as falling outside any acceptable margin of appreciation, however wide that margin might be, and as being incompatible with Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 [to the ECHR]. Hirst at [82].

The ECtHR turned to a 5-4 Canadian ruling and a somewhat-related South African ruling for persuasive authority, but avoided any mention of Ramirez, in what British jurists have decried as "selective comparative law."

Opinio Juris's Roger Alford bewails the ruling: The case is an alarming example of an international tribunal finding an individual right where none exists, interpreting that right broadly to require felon suffrage, ignoring historical roots, rejecting the democratic preferences in 60 percent of Contracting States, and selectively relying on comparative experiences to reach the desired result.

As an American in an age of increasingly sham democracy, I cannot but laud the ECtHR's thrust for voting rights. It is unfortunate that the majority did so on an undeniably sketchy jurisprudential footing, but I hope that this will prove to be another case of an "undemocratic" judiciary setting the tone for new progress in human rights.