106. On the facts the Court held at para 101 that the position in Russia was very similar to that in Hirst (No 2), namely that the applicants were stripped of their right to vote by virtue of a provision of the Russian Constitution which applied to all persons convicted and serving a custodial sentence, irrespective of the length of their sentence and of the nature or gravity of their offence and their individual circumstances. The Court compared Hirst (No 2) at para 82 with Scoppola (No 3) at paras 105-110. The Court said at para 102 that it was prepared to accept that the relevant measure pursued the aims of enhancing civic responsibility and the respect for the rule of law and ensuring the proper functioning and preservation of civil society and the democratic regime and that those aims could not, as such, be excluded as untenable or incompatible with A3P1. 107. The essence of the Court’s decision is set out in para 103. It rejected the Government’s arguments on the issue of proportionality, reiterating the point made in para 82 of Hirst (No 2), that, although the margin of appreciation is wide, it is not all-embracing and added: “the right to vote is not a privilege; in the twenty-first century, the presumption in a democratic State must be in favour of inclusion and universal suffrage has become the basic principle. In the light of modern-day penal policy and of current human rights standards, valid and convincing reasons should be put forward for the continued justification of maintaining such a general restriction on the right of prisoners to vote as that provided for in Article 32(3) of the Russian Constitution (ibid, para 79).” 108. Further, at para 105 the Court emphasised the fact that the Russian constitution imposed a blanket ban on all those imprisoned, from two months, which is the minimum period of imprisonment following conviction in Russia, to life and from “relatively minor offences to offences of the utmost seriousness”. At para 106 it stressed that, as in the United Kingdom, there was no evidence that, when deciding whether to impose a custodial sentence, the court should take into account the fact that the sentence would involve disenfranchisement, so that there was no direct link between the facts of a particular case and the loss of the right to vote. It recognised in para 107 that removal of the right to vote without an ad hoc judicial decision does not of itself give rise to a violation but, in response to an argument that the adoption of the Russian constitution was preceded by extensive public debate, it observed that the Government had submitted no relevant materials to support it. In doing so, it expressly followed an almost identical conclusion in para 79 of Hirst (No 2). Page 50