The Great Debate UK
Taking power from the powerless
-Clive Stafford Smith is the founder and director of Reprieve. The opinions expressed are his own.-
It may be the most mean-spirited thing that David Cameron has yet said since he assumed the mantle of Prime Minister: “It makes me physically ill even to contemplate having to give the vote to anyone who is in prison.” It makes me physically ill to hear an elected official say such a thing.
On which tablet that Moses carried down from Mount Sinai does it say that prisoners should lose the right to vote? The European Court ruling condemning our practice does not pull its conclusion out of thin air: countries across Europe and around the world allow prisoners to vote. Even China only takes the right away from those condemned to life in prison, or to death. Because a prisoner is so often a person who has dwelt on the margins of society, he is the person who most needs the franchise.
Felony disenfranchisement — as the practice is called in the US — has ever been employed to take power from the powerless. When slavery was abolished, some states rushed to deprive convicts of the vote, as a proxy for race. They similarly imposed literacy and property requirements. Only the felony rule survives, and it serves its original, racist purpose. Whites make up 74% of drug users, but only 19% of drug prisoners – nationwide, African-Americans are seven times as likely to lose their right to vote. George W. Bush would never have been president, but for the racist removal of the vote – fully one third of black citizens cannot vote in Florida. The rule in Britain is similarly discriminatory against minorities. Perhaps the Conservative PM was well aware of this when he made his comment.
“Frankly,” Cameron continues, “when people commit a crime and go to prison, they should lose their rights, including the right to vote.” To be sure, they lose their liberty, perhaps the most precious of all rights. What further Dickensian abuses does Cameron propose? Should prisoners lose their right to petition the government for redress? Should they lose their right to be free from torture?
Cameron is pandering to the worst instincts of his party’s extreme wing, turning the issue into an anti-Europe, anti-Human Rights Act rant when the real question is how he can justify disenfranchising those who most need a political voice. It is the British who are out of step. The courts of Canada, Israel and South Africa have agreed with the European Court that the British rule marginalises the people who most need integration.
Cameron’s disdain for the victims of this law is also hypocritical. Various members of his cabinet have described their youthful abuse of drugs; perhaps they have now told the full truth, perhaps not. But presumably, if only they had been caught, they would have fallen into the “revolting” class whose exercise of the franchise makes the PM so ill.
A Bagram betrayal
– Clive Stafford Smith is the director of Reprieve, the UK legal action charity that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners. The opinions expressed are his own. -
As the British death toll climbed above 200 in Afghanistan this week, it became clearer that the politicians were betraying the soldiers who they were sending to fight and die.
The government talks about winning the battle for “hearts and minds” in Helmand Province – apparently oblivious to the loaded history of that phrase. This was the mantra of those who wasted 50,000 American lives in a futile battle to impose democracy at the end of a gun barrel in Vietnam.
Napalm never won an election, and nobody can expect an Afghan to warm to the rule of law when he witnesses his people being locked up in Bagram Air Force Base every day — abused and held without trial for years in Guantanamo’s evil twin. Bagram already holds three times as many prisoners as the Cuban black hole, and $50 million is being spent on a new prison that will add another 1,100 cells.
Captain Kirk Black, an American soldier I met in Guantanamo Bay, is now stationed in the dusty backroad of Afghanistan. He e-mailed, asking Reprieve to represent Gul Khan, a local sheep farmer who had been locked up in Bagram in error. He said that if we could bring justice to an Afghan peasant, then he and his platoon would be a little bit safer. Gul Khan is now back with his flock, and I hope Capt. Black gets credit for his release.
Conversely, British politicians are endangering the lives of soldiers when they conspire with their American allies to perpetuate injustice in Bagram. This, ultimately, is the headline of the latest litigation we announced yesterday.
The background facts show Britain’s complicity in another illegal act of rendition. In 2004, the British arrested two men in Iraq, and turned them over to the Americans, who took them to Bagram. The men remain there to this day, daily abused and divorced from the most basic due process.
Samantha Orobator: On trial in Laos
– Clive Stafford Smith is the director of Reprieve, the UK legal action charity that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners. The opinions expressed are his own. -
Samantha Orobator, a 20 year old British woman, is languishing in the Phonthong Prison in Laos, on a capital charge of carrying a pound and a half of drugs in her luggage. Under the languid Laotian legal system, she would normally have waited two years or more for a trial. However, the Laotians accelerated the schedule, announcing late on Thursday that the trial would be held this Monday. They omitted a few of the niceties: She faced the firing squad without a lawyer.
Anna Morris, our Reprieve barrister from London, was scheduled to meet with her on Tuesday, which may have contributed to the chosen trial date. Criticizing the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party is a criminal offense. Perhaps calling for a fair trial is considered too close to the line; the government reneged on its promise, made before Anna flew 9,344 kilometres (5,806 miles) from London to Laos, to allow three days of legal visits.
Controversy envelopes Samantha. She has been in prison since August 6, 2008, and yet she is due to give birth on September 6, 2009. Khenthong Nuanthasing, the Lao government spokesman, spoke to the BBC Tuesday morning. When asked whether Samantha became pregnant in the prison, he replied: “That’s impossible. A man or guard cannot act in that way *** she was pregnant when she was arrested in August.”
One might be sceptical at this. It would mean her gestation period was at least 13 months which, while plausible were she a blue whale, is not what we expect of human beings. Later Mr Nuanthasing changed his version of events, indicating that she might have been pregnant when she was arrested, but that she lost the first baby while in prison.
How she became pregnant is one pressing issue, but perhaps of most immediate concern is her health and the health of her unborn child. If she has already had one miscarriage in the prison, then Samantha must add it to one she suffered in 2006, when she was beaten by her boyfriend with a bicycle chain.
The Laotians announced Tuesday that they would not execute a pregnant woman, but they planned to plough forward with her trial within the next week, when she faces life in prison. Her prospects are dim. The U.S. State Department, in its 2008 report on Laos, notes that all judges have to be party members, and that a trial such as Samantha’s will be a foregone conclusion, stating quaintly that “judges usually decided guilt or innocence in advance…”
“Even China only takes the right away from those condemned to life in prison, or to death.” Actually China is a Communist Dictatorship so it takes away the right to a meaningful vote away from all it’s citizens bar those in the senior ranks of the Communist party. This is not a good point of comparison – we enfranchise far more people than China.
Cameron is representing the vast majority of the British public who oppose giving prisoners the vote. He is not playing to any wing of his party – there is a broad coalition in Parliament that opposes giving prisoners the right to vote. The UK Parliament voted 234 to 22 to prevent prisoners being allowed to vote. Thirteen European nations have the same policy as we do – a blanket ban on prisoners voting. So the UK policy is not unique and is backed both by Britain’s Parliament and her people.