STRØBYE AND ROSENLIND v. DENMARK JUDGMENT B. Merits 1. Submissions by the parties 77. The applicants did not dispute that the restriction in question pursued a legitimate aim, but maintained that the disenfranchisement had been unjustified and arbitrary. 78. The State should enjoy a narrow margin of appreciation in this matter, since any exclusion of persons with disabilities from public life had to be subject to close scrutiny; that principle also applied to any assessment of whether such exclusion was compatible with international human rights guarantees. 79. In the present case, the disenfranchisement had been an automatic consequence of the applicants being deprived of their legal competence. There had been no assessment of the applicants’ ability to vote. 80. The authorities had been aware that there was no clear and absolute link between a person’s ability to organise his or her own finances and that person’s political rights. Nevertheless, there had been no proper legal debate at the domestic level regarding the appropriateness of the exclusion. 81. Moreover, the Ministry of Justice had continuously refused to amend the relevant legislation; its sole argument for that refusal had been that that would require an amendment to the Constitution, which would be difficult from a practical point of view. Thus, in 2014, even though the United Nations Committee on the Right of Persons with Disabilities had made critical remarks about the legislation at issue, its report and remarks had not prompted any further considerations on the part of the Ministry of Justice. Likewise in 2016, when persons deprived of their legal capacity had been given the right to vote in elections for the European Parliament and in local and regional elections, they had still been denied the right to vote in general elections, as it had been argued that that would require an amendment to the Constitution. It had not been until after the Supreme Court judgment of 18 January 2018 that a thorough analysis of the legislation had been made by the Ministry of Justice. For the first time there had been a substantive and meaningful debate regarding the disenfranchisement of persons deemed to be legally incompetent, which had led to amendments to the Guardianship Act and the Parliamentary Act, which had entered into force on 1 January 2019. 82. In the applicants’ view their case was thus identical to the Court’s judgment in Alajos Kiss v. Hungary (no. 38832/06, 20 May 2010). They found it of no specific importance that the affected group or person in Denmark was narrower than the affected group of persons in Hungary. The essential point was that their disenfranchisement had been arbitrary and an automatic result of their financial incapacity. 24