According to the media, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe has given Britain until the elections in Scotland and Wales next year to comply with the European Court judgement on the Prisoners' Vote.
That's not what the Committee said at all. The media happily and lazily went with the Ministry of Justice press release. Had they bothered to do their jobs, they would have realised that the Committee was extremely grumpy about the UK ignoring the Court for 5 years and gave Britain 3 months to sort this mess out.
A shiny new Government has already picked up old political habits - if you lie insistently enough, it becomes the accepted truth.
Just to ram home the point that prisoners are in the right on this, a bunch of us here are applying to the European Court for compensation, having being denied the chance to vote in May.
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I don't think that the MoJ actually released a press release. Rather, press enquiries were met with the message that the media would be informed when the government knew what it was doing.
ReplyDeleteIt does not inspire confidence in me when the government admits it does not know what it is doing!
Support the repeal of s.3 campaign.
Good luck Ben, hope your campaign will be successful. Also in highlighting the injustice of denying prisoners voting rights. Keep on keeping on!
ReplyDeleteI think the press just write what they feel like writing to get get more copies sold, regardless of what anybody actually said or didn't say - including the government!
ReplyDeleteI think everyone who was denied the chance to vote in May should petition the European court because it was such a tight race that the number of people who were at the polling stations and denied a chance to vote (London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle) could have had a real impact on the result.