The Enfranchisement of Prisoners: A Comparison of Scotland and Spain
Location:
Teaching Room 3
Old College
Date/time
Fri 12 June 2026
12:00-13:00
About the event
Comparative analyses of criminal disenfranchisement reveal that, although restrictions on voting and electoral participation remain very common, the enfranchisement of prisoners has progressed globally in the last decades. The processes across different countries for extending enfranchisement to prisoners vary significantly. In the UK, for example, the ECHR judgment in Hirst v. UK (2005) sparked an intense political and academic debate regarding prisoners’ voting rights. Whilst England and Wales have remained resistant to changing their laws in accordance with this judgment, Scotland has taken significant steps in recent years, including granting voting rights to those sentenced to terms of less than 12 months in 2020. In Spain, the process was markedly different: in 1995, prisoners were granted the right to vote with the adoption of a new Criminal Code, without any political or academic debate. Thirty years later, however, voter turnout in Spanish prisons remains extremely low. This suggest the existence of de facto mechanisms of disenfranchisement and illustrates the Spanish prison system’s capacity to formally recognise rights without ensuring they are effectively upheld. In this presentation, I will briefly examine these two different enfranchisement processes, discussing some of their distinctive and common features.
Presenter: Manuel Maroto is a professor of criminal law and criminology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain and is currently a Visiting researcher at Edinburgh Law School. His research focuses on some of the ways in which political participation and the criminal justice system intersect.
Chair: Milena Tripkovic
Image credit: Magnific