Legal challenge to uphold the expat vote for British nationals in the EU Referendum.
The London law firm Leigh Day lodged an application for an urgent judicial review against the UK Government in the High Court on 16th March 2016. This application challenges the decision to exclude up to 2 million British nationals living in the European Union from the right to vote in June’s EU Referendum.
Expat vote – impossible to register online
The London based law firm is acting on behalf of two British citizens who are excluded in voting in the Referendum: 94-year-old Harry Shindler, a Second World War veteran who lives in Italy, and lawyer and Belgian resident Jacquelyn MacLennan.
Both claim that under the EU Referendum Act 2015 they are being denied the right to vote on the UK’s continued membership of the EU. They are not eligible to vote because they have not been resident in the UK for more than 15 years.
The “15 year residence test” has developed from a originally being a 5 year period imposed by the Representation of the People Act 1985, in relation to voting in parliamentary elections in the UK, and which was then amended up to 20 years in 1989 and down to 15 years in 2000. This rule has previously been the subject of litigation in the domestic courts (R (Preston) v Lord President of the Council [2011] EWHC 3174), and in the European Court of Human Rights which was petitioned by Harry Shindler.
The European Commission issued a Recommendation in 2014 to the UK that it should change the law, on the basis that people exercising their right of freedom to move and work in other member states were being penalised by not being able to vote any longer in the country of which they were a national, and were consequently being disenfranchised. The Conservative Party then pledged in its 2015 manifesto to introduce a vote for life to British nationals, however the UK government have not proposed any legislation to reverse this rule ahead of the crucial referendum on whether the United Kingdom remains in the EU.
Lawyers for the claimants state that excluding UK expats who have lived elsewhere in the EU for more than 15 years acts prevents them from participating in a democratic process, the result of which might bring to an end the very EU law rights on which they rely and base their working lives.
The judicial review of the legislation, if successful, would require the Government to rush through amending legislation to change the franchise for the forthcoming referendum in June 2016. There is precedent for such fast track legislation going through Parliament in a matter of days, they point to the the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 which received Royal Assent on 17 July 2014 after being introduced before Parliament just three days before, on 14 July 2014, in response to a European Court decision that declared the Data Retention Directive to be invalid.
