loss of voting rights may continue even after a prisoner’s release. It is apparent that this is not a question on which there is any consensus. 115. From a prisoner’s point of view the loss of the right to vote is likely to be a very minor deprivation by comparison with the loss of liberty. There are no doubt prisoners whose interest in public affairs or strong views on particular issues are such that their disenfranchisement represents a serious loss, just as there are prisoners (probably more numerous) whose enthusiasm for active sports makes imprisonment a special hardship. The severity of a sentence of imprisonment for the convicted person will always vary with a wide variety of factors whose impact on him or her will inevitably be arbitrary to some degree. It has been said, for example, that disenfranchisement may bear hardly on someone sentenced to, say, a short period of imprisonment which happens to coincide with a general election. For some prisoners, this will no doubt be true. But I decline to regard it as any more significant than the fact that it may coincide with a special anniversary, a long anticipated holiday or the only period of fine weather all summer. 116. Article 3 of the First Protocol to the Human Rights Convention provides that the contracting parties “undertake to hold free elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot, under conditions which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature.” In 2005, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held in Hirst v United Kingdom (No 2) (2005) 42 EHRR 849 that a “blanket restriction” on voting by all prisoners violated article 3 of the First Protocol. In Greens and MT v United Kingdom (2010) 53 EHRR 710, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a “pilot judgment” on a large number of petitions by convicted prisoners which sought damages for the denial of their rights under article 3 of the First Protocol, consequent upon the decision in Hirst. The court refused to make an award of damages, but directed that the United Kingdom should “bring forward, within six months of the date upon which the present judgment becomes final, legislative proposals intended to amend the 1983 Act and, if appropriate, the 2002 Act in a manner which is Convention-compliant” and effectively stayed further proceedings on pending petitions of the same kind until the expiry of that period. The deadline was subsequently extended by the European Court until six months after the judgment of the Grand Court in another case, Scoppola v Italy (No 3) (2012) 56 EHRR 663, in which the United Kingdom government proposed to intervene to make submissions about the correctness of Hirst. However, the judgment in that case, which was delivered on 22 May 2012, reaffirmed both the reasoning and the decision in Hirst. The deadline imposed by the Strasbourg Court expired in November 2012. 117. In December 2006, in the light of the decision in Hirst, the Government published a consultation paper setting out two alternative proposals for amending section 3 of the Representation of the People Act. One was to enfranchise Page 53