Law Humor

In what appears to be a true story and not one found in The Onion, sources report that a bill introduced in the German parliament would lower the voting age to zero.

A spokesman for German embryos and fetuses said his clients would eventually be outraged that they were being discriminated against.

No fewer than 46 members of parliament, mostly from the Free Democratic Party, sponsored the bill to lower the voting age from 18 to birth.  "At the moment," said a supporting document, "some 14 million Germans are denied the right to vote, purely because of their age."  Well, that's not strictly true - there is also, as to some, their utter inability to use language or process rational thought.  But since that obviously doesn't disqualify people from running for parliament, why should it be relevant to voting rights?

The sponsors said that the time had come to give more importance to the rights of children, citing studies they said had found that it was in the public interest for children and adolescents to exercise political rights.  A similar bill was proposed in 2005, but did not pass.

According to one report, under the legislation an infant's physical inability to vote would not be a problem, because the law would provide that parents could vote on behalf of their offspring "until such time that the children felt they were ready to cast ballots themselves."

Link: Telegraph
Link: The Local: Germany's News in English