I have been following the debate about prisoners’ voting rights in the UK with growing incredulity. Some find the Hirst decision of the European Court of Human Rights on this point so provocative and wrong - the Court told the UK that it had to give some prisoners the vote, and David Cameron said the judgment made him feel physically sick - that they are advocating withdrawal from the European Convention of Human Rights. British rights are better than European rights! Please don’t make our prime minister sick!

The story is current now because the government is awaiting the outcome of an appeal to the Court on prisoners’ voting rights (Scoppola v Italy (No 3)), and the attorney general has said that he will address the full court in that appeal to outline UK concerns: 'I will argue that the principle of subsidiarity requires the court to accept that on issues of social policy such as prisoner voting, where strong, opposing reasonable views may be held and where parliament has fully debated the issue, the judgement as to the appropriate system of disenfranchisement of prisoners is for parliament and the court should not interfere with that judgement unless it is manifestly without reasonable foundation.

'And this is an argument that I would submit really cannot be advanced in respect of our national practice on this issue.'

I find this a puzzling debate from several points of view. First of all, what is wrong with prisoners voting? Here is a group of people probably most affected by the actions of the state against them (for good reason, I know), a group whom we all want to become sound citizens in the public interest, a group who have not ceased to be citizens just because they are in jail. Why not give them the vote?

There is no logical connection - now that we have moved beyond the civic death of medieval times - between their actions and their ability to vote. They continue to be liable for taxes behind bars, but cannot vote. What about the old battle-cry: no taxation without representation?

Then there is the idea of withdrawal from the European Convention of Human Rights. We do not like some of its judgments and so we withdraw. Is that a good reason? It is in the nature of litigation that there will be winners and losers, and human rights cases inevitably involve a complicated balance of interests. We invade other countries, or bomb them, to bring human rights to their citizens, but withdraw from one of the key human rights conventions in the world because we do not like one (or maybe more) of its decisions? That does not seem to me to be setting an example to those we are invading and bombing.

Finally, withdrawal from the Convention does not make complete sense, since the European Union is itself acceding to the Convention, and so the Convention will be applied through the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Of course, that will be different to the individual claims made to the Strasbourg Court, but it means that there is no escape from the Convention - unless the UK withdraws also from the EU (which may be the answer some would like to see).

The European Convention has its problems, which are mainly caused by the Court’s financial burdens. The European Court of Human Rights has a huge backlog, and is struggling to reduce it. There is a debate at present as to whether that can best be achieved by charging claimants a fee, or requiring claimants to use a lawyer. Either method, it is presumed, would reduce the large number of inadmissible claims. The Court favours the requirement to use a lawyer - and of the two remedies on offer, so does the CCBE - but it is also not problem-free from the point of view of access to justice: would there be a legal aid system, and if so, funded and operated by whom? is there evidence that it would reduce the number of inadmissible claims? and so on.

I realise that the debate goes beyond prisoners’ voting rights themselves. Some feel that the judges at the Court are not all of good quality, or that they come from countries (there are 47 members of the Council of Europe) which have very poor human rights records. Some feel that the Court itself interprets the Convention too broadly - the use of an article relating to torture in a smacking case, for instance.

Nothing is perfect. We have 12,000 life prisoners in the UK, more than Russia, Poland, Germany and France added together. Someone was recently sentenced to four years for inciting a riot which never happened. I can see it is time for me to withdraw from the UK legal system.