Alajos Kiss v. Hungary | 2010

End to automatic voting ban for people placed under guardianship

The European Court [of Human Rights] held unanimously that such an absolute ban violated the right to free elections…

Antoine Buyse, writing for the ECHR blog, part of the Guardian Legal Network

Background

At first, Alajos Kiss did not realise that the situation he was in because of his mental health difficulties meant he had lost the right to vote.

In 2005, a Hungarian court had placed Alajos under partial state guardianship.

Though he could take care of himself, he struggled with certain things because of his bipolar disorder. He often wasted money and would occasionally become aggressive. Being placed under guardianship meant that certain decisions would be made for him – which Alajos accepted was for his own good.

But when elections were due to take place in Hungary in 2006, he discovered that his name was missing from the electoral register.

Alajos first complained to the electoral office, but to no avail.

He then took legal action, but a Hungarian court dismissed his case, pointing to the fact that Hungary’s constitution said that people under guardianship had no right to vote.

Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights

The European court found that Hungary breached Alajos’s right to vote.

Hungary did not dispute Alajos’s claim that 0.75% of the voting age population had automatically lost their right to vote after being placed under guardianship.

The Hungarian government had said that these people should not be allowed to vote because they were unable to manage their own affairs owing to their mental state or other difficulties.

While the European court found this was a “legitimate aim”, it could not accept that it was fair to automatically ban any person placed under partial guardianship from voting, regardless of their personal circumstances.

The court said there should be “very weighty” reasons for restricting the rights of people with mental disabilities, “a vulnerable group in society . . . who have suffered considerable discrimination in the past”.

We are happy to see that, as a result of this decision, Hungary changed its constitution and several other European countries followed suit to extend the franchise to persons with disabilities.

Dr Janos Fiala-Butora, Alajos Kiss’s lawyer in this case

Follow-up

Following the European court’s judgment in Alajos’s case, Hungary ended the automatic voting ban for people under guardianship as part of wider changes to the country’s constitution, which came into force in 2012.

The new Fundamental Law (Constitution) specifies that Hungarian courts must decide whether the individual circumstances of each person placed under guardianship justifies their voting rights being restricted.

Hungary later made other changes to the law to make this clear.

23% of people placed under partial guardianship between 2013 and 2014 kept their right to vote. This would not have been possible before the changes were introduced.

In 2015, a Hungarian court once again placed Alajos under partial guardianship – but this time he was not barred from voting.

Additional information

Themes:

Related examples

End to voting ban for certain types of prisoners

A jailed businessman complained that Turkey’s ban on prisoners voting breached his electoral rights. The European court agreed with Ahmet Söyler, finding that the restriction violated the human rights convention because it was applied in an “automatic and indiscriminate” way. This judgment led Turkey to lift the voting ban for certain types of prisoners.

Themes: Right to free elections

Türkiye

Impact of the European Convention on Human Rights