The Czech Republic currently has over 30,000 people legally incapacitated. By no means are all of them restricted in their right to vote. This issue therefore relates only to a relatively small group of people.

Recognition of the right to vote is an important issue not only for all individuals with limited legal capacity, but also for democracy itself.

In support of the voting rights of people with disabilities, six Czech NGOs submitted an open letter to the country's Supreme Court. Here is an excerpt:

1) Universal suffrage as the basis of democratic governance

People with health disabilities are the last group whose participation in the electoral process is being challenged. Yet the developments in the field of human rights speak clearly - if we want to talk about democracy and universal suffrage, we must give suffrage to all adults.

The efforts of people with disabilities to have their human rights recognized on an equal footing with others culminated in the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

It tolerates no exceptions to active or passive voting rights on the basis of the kind and degree of disability, or amount of support needed.

The icing on the cake was the acceptance of Robert Martin, a person with an intellectual disability, as Australia’s representative in the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which passes binding interpretations of the said UN Convention.

2) Practice of assessing voting eligibility in the Czech Republic

We also express concern that the current role of expert evaluation in assessment of "voting eligibility" creates a large playing field for arbitrary and unchallengeable decisions. As of today, neither in the Czech Republic nor abroad does there exist a unified scientifically recognized method for evaluating someone’s faculty to cast a vote in an election.

In practice, we have witnessed cases where experts formed their opinion regarding the faculty to choose on the basis of answers given to questions like "What’s the name of the current president?" or "Which political parties do you know?"

Another expert even conceded that the ability to choose was demonstrated just as long as the person is physically able to get into the polling station. Political choice is a very individual and personal decision, and it is hard to imagine that there could be objective criteria for assessing someone’s ability to make such decisions.

Moreover, as we have pointed out earlier, no other population group is being assessed for their ability to select a candidate or a political party. A system which calls into question the ability to choose only among people with disabilities while guaranteeing such right for other without qualification, is clearly discriminatory and unacceptable in contemporary society. After all, the aforementioned international documents reach the same conclusion.

We should in fact do much more. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities lays out that states must exert reasonable efforts to ensure that elections are accessible to all, especially through adaptations of the electoral process and provision of support to those in need.

3) What the Civil Code says about restricting the exercise of voting rights

Under the provisions of Section 55, paragraph 2 of the Civil Code, legal capacity of a person can be restricted only if he would otherwise be under threat of serious harm and if no milder and less restrictive measure can achieve the same result.

The degree of risk for a person’s rights must therefore be evaluated separately for every area to be restricted. In this context, it is hard to imagine how a court should assess the harm potentially suffered by a person casting his or her vote. If the restrictions of voting rights for people with disabilities are motivated by concerns to protect the public or the electoral system, such a measure will never be in compliance with the spirit and the letter of the Civil Code.

We would also like to mention that there is widespread prejudice in society that people with an intellectual or psychosocial disability can be "manipulated" more easily, and that other people are immune to such manipulation. Such claims have no empirical basis.

On the contrary, research suggests that information delivered in an accessible manner or by a close person can increase the degree of understanding the information.

After all, every election campaign is based on persuasion, and one can hardly distinguish which of the votes cast have really been "rational." For this reason, the state must set rules in order to minimize the abuse of the electoral process as much as possible, but without interfering with the rights of individuals to make their choice. Since it is only several thousand people who are currently incapacitated on their voting right, it is clear that even if they all decided to vote, it would not result in a fundamental change to the multi-million Czech electorate.

Signatories:

The Human Rights League, www.llp.cz

Quip, www.kvalitavpraxi.cz

Society to Support People with Intellectual Disabilities, www.spmpcr.cz

Inventura, www.inventura.org

Mental Disability Advocacy Centre, www.mdac.info

LEAP into life, www.skokdozivota.cz

The entire text of the letter (in Czech) can be found here.