STRØBYE AND ROSENLIND v. DENMARK JUDGMENT
83. The Government submitted that there had been no violation of
Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention, since the restriction on the
right to vote had been proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued.
84. Section 29 of the Constitution, which excluded persons who had
been declared legally incompetent from voting (in addition to persons who
had not attained the age of majority) had the legitimate aim of ensuring that
voters in general elections had the required level of mental skills. In that
connection, it had been necessary to link the grounds for exclusion to clearcut criteria that were objective, clear and predictable.
85. As regards the proportionality of the restriction, the Government
referred to the Supreme Court’s reasoning in its judgment of 18 January
2018.
86. They emphasised that the present case differed significantly from
that of Alajos Kiss (cited above). Under the Danish arrangement, only a
small group of persons were disenfranchised – namely those who were both
subject to guardianship and had been deprived of their legal capacity under
section 6 of the Guardianship Act. However, a person could not be deprived
of his or her legal capacity if his or her interests could be sufficiently
guarded through guardianship under section 5. The deprivation of legal
capacity was thus a measure that affected a narrow group of persons,
amounting to 0.046% of the Danish population of voting age, whereas
0.75% of the Hungarian population was subject to disenfranchisement.
Moreover, the Danish legislature had considered on an ongoing basis the
issue of disenfranchisement and had sought to extend the franchise as much
as possible, as far as the Constitution allowed – hence, inter alia, the most
recent amendment to the Constitution in 1953, and the amendment of rules
on guardianship in 1996, and again in 2016 and 2019.
87. The Government reiterated that disenfranchisement as an automatic
legal consequence could be in accordance with Article 3 of Protocol No. 1,
provided that it was proportionate, and not of a general, automatic and
indiscriminate nature (see, inter alia, Scoppola v. Italy (no. 3), no. 126/05,
§ 102, 18 January 2011). The Danish rules setting out the conditions for
depriving a person of his or her legal capacity were very strict and closely
related to the issue of whether the person in question was able to foresee the
consequences of his or her decisions and to make conscious and judicious
decisions. Such decisions had to be made by a court. Moreover, under the
relevant Danish legislation there were objective, clear and predictable
criteria for qualifying for suffrage, and the circumstances automatically
giving rise to disenfranchisement were detailed in the law.
88. As regards the applicants’ submissions that there was no difference
between the right to vote in general elections and the right to vote in
elections for the European Parliament, the Government recalled that the
legislature had seriously considered that matter during the readings of the
bill by which the right to vote in European Parliament elections had been
25