Why should any of us care about politics? The obvious answer is that the politicians we elect make decisions that affect our lives and the world we live in. Increasingly, however, the range of matters that can be decided by our chosen representatives is narrowed and stunted. Those who live in the European Union find that much is decided for them by processes that are beyond the reach of democratic politics. But there is another way, affecting those European countries and many others, in which the scope of political decision-making is reduced: the constant expansion of international human rights law. As the range of topics that are subject to it grows, the area in which democratic legislatures can make their own decisions contracts. Politics is not corrupted thereby, but it is limited and, in the end, downgraded. Strangely, though, the people who promote the onward march of human rights seem not to notice the gradual erosion of what may be one of the most important rights of all in the modern world: the right to live in a properly functioning democracy.

Take, as just one example, the disputed question of whether prisoners should be allowed to vote in elections. This is clearly an issue on which fair-minded people can disagree. Among the world’s liberal democracies, policy varies. In New Zealand, prisoners cannot vote; in most European countries they can; in Australia they cannot if their sentence is for more than five years; and in the United States