STRØBYE AND ROSENLIND v. DENMARK JUDGMENT legislature. When determining whether a restriction on the right to vote is compatible with the Convention, the European Court of Human Rights takes into account whether the restriction pursues a legitimate aim and whether it is proportionate to that aim. In the judgment of 20 May 2010 in Alajos Kiss v. Hungary, which concerned a provision of the Hungarian Constitution providing that persons placed under total or partial guardianship did not have the right to vote, the European Court of Human Rights was satisfied that the restriction pursued a legitimate aim. That aim was to ensure that only citizens capable of assessing the consequences of their decisions and of making conscious and judicious decisions should participate in public affairs. The European Court of Human Rights found, however, that the Hungarian measure was disproportionate, for which reason it constituted a violation of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1. In making that assessment, the European Court of Human Rights took into account the fact that the Hungarian Constitution did not distinguish between persons under total and persons under partial guardianship, and that there was no evidence that the competing interests had been weighed in order to assess the proportionality of the restriction. It furthermore appears from the judgment that 0.75% of the Hungarian population of voting age had been disenfranchised on account of being under guardianship, that the European Court of Human Rights considered that that was a significant figure, and that it could not be claimed that the restriction on the right to vote was negligible in its effects. The European Court of Human Rights found that the absolute disenfranchisement of all persons under partial guardianship without due consideration being given to [the degree of] their mental disability did not fall within an acceptable margin of appreciation, referring, inter alia, to the fact that the margin of appreciation allowed the Contracting States is substantially narrower if disenfranchisement applies to a particularly vulnerable group in society and that weighty reasons are required for such disenfranchisement. When the applicant lost his right to vote as a consequence of the automatic disfranchisement imposed, without access to any remedy, on persons under partial guardianship, he suffered a violation, for which reason the European Court of Human Rights did not speculate as to whether the applicant would still have been deprived of the right to vote even if a more limited restriction on the rights of the mentally disabled had been imposed, in line with the requirements of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1. The European Court of Human Rights also said that the treatment of those with intellectual or mental disabilities as a single class constituted a questionable classification and that the curtailment of their rights must be subject to strict scrutiny. The indiscriminate removal of voting rights without an individualised judicial evaluation and solely on the basis of a mental disability necessitating partial guardianship could therefore not be considered to constitute legitimate grounds for restricting the right to vote. The Alajos Kiss judgment is the only judgment on disenfranchisement imposed as a consequence of guardianship, except for the judgments delivered by panels of three judges on 23 September 2014 in Gajcsi v. Hungary and on 21 October 2014 in Harmati v. Hungary, in which cases the Hungarian government did not dispute the alleged violation of the Convention. The Supreme Court finds that the purpose of disenfranchising legally incompetent persons under section 29 of the Constitution falls within the framework of a measure deemed to pursue a legitimate aim, as set out by the European Court of Human Rights in Alajos Kiss. The question is now whether the requirement of proportionality has been met. The first condition that must be met in order to deprive a person of his or her legal capacity under section 6 of the Guardianship Act is that the person must be unable to manage his or her own affairs owing to mental unsoundness or mental disability, etc. 5

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