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AbstractAccording to Article 26 of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, permanent residents shall have the right to vote and the right to stand for election in accordance with the law. In the eyes of the public, voting is a fundamental right of democracy and promotes citizen participation in choosing the people to represent them in the political system. It is true to say that, 'an inclusive democracy values all of its citizens' (Right to Vote, 2005). However, does every citizen who is above 18 years old have the right to vote in Hong Kong? While prisoners are deprived the right to vote in Hong Kong, other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Europe, and Canada currently practise criminal disenfranchisement in more limited ways. To fill the gap, this paper aims to examine whether laws should be reviewed and amended to remove the barrier to voting faced by the prisoner in Hong Kong. It argues that Hong Kong should grant the right of prisoners to vote through examining relevant laws and several landmark court cases.

AbstractThis article argues that Canada's policy of refusing extraterritorial electoral constituencies within its borders does not protect its territorial sovereignty or add any protection against foreign interference in its domestic affairs. Rather, its main effect is to alienate thousands of dual or foreign nationals residing in Canada by preventing them from being directly represented in their home state's national assembly or legislature and, in some cases, from exercising their only voting rights.

Abstract
It is fully legitimate and permissible under international human rights law to limit the right to vote to the citizens of the State. The relationship between sovereignty, citizenship and the right to vote is to some extent self-evident and undramatic. However, the triangular relationship between the three concepts is an important background factor summarizing much of what States are and do, and therefore, it is necessary to make visible the self-sustaining nature of the triangle and explicate the three corners of the triangle by means of drafting history of the human rights conventions and case law from international and national court instances as well as by means of examples from national law, in this case drawn from the Nordic space. The point here is that although the various human rights conventions formulate a right to participation through elections, the normative powers exercised in relation to sovereignty, citizenship and the right to vote are held by the national law-maker, and they are not influenced much by international human rights law.

Section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms sets out the democratic rights of Canadian citizens.


Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.


Donald Smiley has written that "some of the rights contained in the Charter are stated so explicitly that there is little doubt about their meaning and effect," and that section 3 is one of the best examples of such clarity. But Smiley was wrong. The "meaning and effect" of section 3 has been thrown into doubt by the question whether its guarantee of the right to vote extends to imprisoned criminals. Newfoundland obviously thinks that it does, for in The Charter of Rights Amendment Act 1985, it repealed the traditional prohibition of prisoner voting. Other jurisdictions have chosen to retain the legal prohibition and to defend it against constitutional challenges mounted by inmates of Canadian prisons. The issue is probably headed for the Supreme Court, which will have to decide whether prisoners are full "citizens" within the meaning of section 3, and, if they are, whether a limit on their right to vote can be justified under section 1 as a "reasonable limit, demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society."

AbstractThe right to vote is the most important political right in international human rights law. Framed within the broader right of political participation, it is the only right in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights not guaranteed as a universal human right but rather as a citizen's right. While limitations on the right to vote are permissible in respect of citizenship and age, residency-based restrictions are not explicitly provided. However, recent judgments of the European Court of Human Rights endorse a view that voting rights may be conditioned on residency on the grounds of an individual's bond to their country-of-origin and the extent to which laws passed by that government would affect them. This article questions this proposition and explores whether disenfranchisement based solely on residency constitutes an unreasonable and discriminatory restriction to the essence of the right.

At the core of democracy is a simple idea: one person, one vote. However, all democracies disenfranchise citizens below a certain age. What justifies this practice? The answer seems obvious: voting isn't a children's game. When citizens head to the ballots, a lot is at stake: who runs the government and what policies are implemented significantly affects the lives of many citizens. According to a widely held view, voting requires a certain competence that children lack. If we take this idea a little further, we may conclude that adult citizens ought to demonstrate a certain level of competence before receiving the right to vote, too. However, most contemporary political philosophers reject this "epistocratic" line of thought. Either for epistemic, moral, or pragmatic reasons, they endorse enfranchising every adult. This raises the central question of this dissertation: can we justify giving the right to vote to all and only citizens above a certain age? I argue that we cannot. To establish this claim, I assess three different voting schemes: Standard Democracy, which gives exactly one vote to all and only citizens above a certain age; Epistocratic Democracy, which gives more voting power to "politically knowledgeable" citizens; and Ageless Democracy, which gives all citizens, regardless of age, the right to cast exactly one vote in democratic procedures. First, I defend Standard Democracy against Epistocratic Democracy. This amounts to an argument that all citizens above a certain age should have equal voting rights. I then evaluate potential justifications for conceding these rights only to citizens above a certain age, and reject them. This amounts to a case for Ageless Democracy. Abandoning the voting age is both a theoretically consistent implication of rejecting Epistocratic Democracy and a practically desirable approach to reinvigorating democratic procedures.

"Wachsende Kinderarmut und ausufernde Staatsverschuldung sind Symptome einer gesellschaftlichen Fehlentwicklung. Die Analyse ergibt als Ursache ein strukturelles Defizit des politischen Entscheidungssystems. Die Interessen der Kinder bis zum 18. Lebensjahr können weder in der Gesellschaft pluralistisch vertreten, noch im politischen System repräsentiert werden, denn sie sind nicht Teil des Systems. Da sich die politischen Akteure systemrational verhalten, bevorzugen sie die aktuellen Interessen der Wahlberechtigten, insbesondere der wachsenden Gruppe der Senioren. Eine sachrationale, an Nachhaltigkeit orientierte Politik ist daher erst dann möglich, wenn auch die Interessen der Kindergeneration integraler Bestandteil des politischen Systems werden. Dies ist systemimmanent nur zu erreichen durch die Aufhebung der Altersgrenze für das aktive Wahlrecht. Erst diese Einbeziehung in das Wahlvolk eröffnet der Generation der Minderjährigen die für das pluralistische Funktionieren einer Gesellschaft erforderliche Möglichkeit der Interessenvertretung und die für die Interessendurchsetzung erforderliche politische Repräsentation." (Autorenreferat)

This article analyses the special legal regimes that were introduced in Lithuania which dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic during the spring of 2020 and which decided on extraordinary measures in order to contain the spread of this vicious transmissible disease, and how the right to vote was ensured during the 2020 Parliament (Seimas) elections. After examining these special legal regimes, the article concludes that according to the Constitution, the threat to public health, inter alia caused by the worldwide spread of a vicious contagious disease, is not a constitutional ground for introducing a state of emergency per se, unless this threat to public health menaces the constitutional order or social peace. Therefore, the establishment of other special legal regimes – a disaster management regime and quarantine – was chosen, and were introduced by the government in accordance with the law. The analysis in this article shows that the right to vote during the 2020 Seimas elections was proportionately restricted due to the pandemic, and the pandemic did not prevent the holding of general, secret and direct parliamentary elections. The pandemic forced the Seimas to adopt long-awaited amendments to the laws that legalized electronic voting in the country. ; agne.juskeviciute-viliene@tf.vu.lt ; Agnė Juškevičiūtė-Vilienė – Assistant Prof. Dr. at the Faculty of Law, Vilnius University, Lithuania. ; Vilnius University, Lithuania ; Ayala Corao, C., Challenges that the COVID-19 Pandemic Poses to the Rule of Law, Democracy, and Human Rights, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law (MPIL) Research Paper No. 2020–23, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3638158. ; Birmontienė, T. and Miliuvienė J., Konstituciniai reikalavimai valstybės valdžios institucijoms reaguojant į pandemijos padiktuotus iššūkius Lietuvoje, (in:) L. Jakulevičienė and V. Sinkevičius (eds.), Lietuvos teisė 2020. Esminiai pokyčiai I dalis. COVID-19 pandemijos sprendimai: teisiniai, valdymo ir ekonominiai aspektai, Vilnius 2020, pp. 7–22. ...