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.
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