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Commentators discuss the prisoners' right to vote ahead of it being debated overturning the ban the House of Commons on Thursday.

The that if we deny prisoners the vote, we undermine our democracy:

"[T]here is a strong moral case for lifting the ban. As Dr Peter Selby, former bishop to HM Prisons, has said, disfranchising prisoners makes them 'outlaws', while doing nothing to promote deterrence. Prison deprives inmates of their liberty, not their citizenship. Imposing a form of civic death on the marginalised will make them less fit to rejoin society. As the Canadian Supreme Court has stated, denying prisoners the vote undermines the legitimacy of government."

Conversely, giving prisoners the right to vote would mock democracy:

"The great mass of the British people believe that criminals forfeit their right to vote - and thereby to influence the legislative process - as part of their punishment for breaking the law.

"This is why it's so vital that when MPs vote on the issue next week, they send out an unmistakable signal to the courts that the authority of Parliament must take precedence over unelected judges."

David Cameron's promise in 2007 to abolish the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights:

"How ironic, then, that Mr Cameron should now be Prime Minister of a government which is proposing to capitulate to the European Court of Human Rights and - even though he says it makes him 'physically sick' to do so - give prisoners the right to vote."

that with support from other European states, we can repatriate our law of human rights:

"Since the convention was incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998, the UK courts have loyally given effect to Strasbourg's rulings. The result has been that UK judges have reached decisions, sometimes with regret and sometimes with enthusiasm, that would have astonished those who agreed to our accession to the convention in 1950.

"The tendency has been to say that there is nothing to be done. We are stuck with the Strasbourg court unless we are willing to cast ourselves as a pariah state and get expelled from the EU. But the situation is not so hopeless and there are means by which, with support from other European states, we can repatriate our law of human rights. It is worth a try."

, a QC who specialises in international human rights law, criticises Lord Hoffmann's stance against Strasbourg:

"[L]ike any effective advocate, Lord Hoffmann is selective in the points that he chooses to make.

"His quarrel with the Strasbourg court can be traced back to the days of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. In the late 1980s, Doreen Hill, the mother of Sutcliffe's last victim, Jacqueline Hill, brought a negligence claim against West Yorkshire Police, arguing that if they had done their job properly, Sutcliffe would have been caught before he killed her daughter. The House of Lords in 1989 decided that the police were effectively immune from civil claims for negligence in carrying out criminal investigations. The ruling remained the law for another 10 years, and it was gradually applied to more and more public bodies. So when a local authority failed to remove children from abusive parents, despite the most shocking evidence of a failure to perform their statutory childcare responsibilities, the House of Lords applied the Peter Sutcliffe principle. It didn't matter how much damage had been caused to the children, the English courts simply refused to entertain or examine the merits of the claim.

"When the odd and unjust rule was finally considered in Strasbourg, it was swept away. That was hardly surprising. Shortly afterwards the Court took the same approach to child victims of domestic abuse, holding that where a local authority is faced with overwhelming evidence of ill-treatment, it is under a duty to use its statutory powers to remove the children to a place of safety. Would anyone now seriously quarrel with those propositions?"Well, er, yes. Lord Hoffmann would."

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