people”. In circumstances where the Grand Chamber accepted as a legitimate aim of disenfranchisement “enhancing civic responsibility and respect for the rule of law” (Scoppola, para 90), the United Kingdom was, as a participatory democracy, entitled to withhold the vote from those serving sentences for offences sufficiently serious to justify such a sentence, including those who, after their tariff period, could not satisfy the Parole Board that it was “no longer necessary for the protection of the public” that they should be confined (Crime (Sentences) Act 1997, section 28(6)(b)). 31. Secondly, the Grand Chamber in Hirst (No 2) (para 79) attached some significance to a suggested lack of “evidence that Parliament [had] ever sought to weigh the competing interests or to assess the proportionality of a blanket ban on the right of a convicted prisoner to vote”, adding only: “It may perhaps be said that, by voting the way they did to exempt unconvicted prisoners from the restriction on voting, Parliament implicitly affirmed the need for continued restrictions on the voting rights of convicted prisoners. Nonetheless it cannot be said that there was any substantive debate by members of the legislature on the continued justification in light of modern day penal policy and of current human rights standards for maintaining such a general restriction on the right of prisoners to vote.” 32. The majority in Scoppola did not mention this factor, as Judge Thór Björgvinsson, dissenting, pointed out at paras OI-09 and OI-15. Nevertheless, the Attorney General submits that it is relevant that Parliament has, since Hirst (No 2), conducted three formal debates, in Westminster Hall on 11 January 2011, in the Commons on 10 February 2011, when MPs voted 234 to 22 to maintain the status quo, and again in the Commons on 22 November 2012, after the Lord Chancellor introduced a draft Bill, the outcome of which is not yet determined. Mindful of the injunction in the Bill of Rights 1688 “That the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament”, the Attorney General did not suggest that we should seek to evaluate the quality of the debate in Parliament. But he relied upon the fact of debate and the continuation following it of the ban on prisoner voting as underlining his submission that the Convention rights should be understood and applied in a way respecting the choice made by the institution competent to make such choices in a democracy. He pointed out that the Court in its recent decision in Animal Defenders International v United Kingdom (Application No 48876/08, 22 April 2013) demonstrated the “considerable weight” that it was prepared to attach to “exacting and pertinent reviews, by both parliamentary and judicial bodies, of the complex regulatory regime governing political broadcasting in the United Kingdom and to their view that the general measure [prohibiting religious or political advertising on radio and television] was necessary to prevent the Page 19