EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION / Alla Tymofeyeva (ed.)

CHAPTER X. RIGHTS OF LEGAL PERSONS UNDER THE CONVENTION

1. NOTION OF A LEGAL PERSON Neither the Convention, nor the Court in its case-law, gives a precise definition of the term ‘legal person’. However, on the basis of the Court’s practice, it is possible to derive which groups or entities could be considered a legal entity for the purposes of the Convention. It is known that the Travaux Préparatoires to the Convention’s primary version of Article 34 included wording „any natural and legal person”. However, due to political reasons, it was changed. The current wording of Article 34 of the Convention reads as follows: “The Court may receive applications from any person, nongovernmental organisation or group of individuals claiming to be the victim of a violation by one of the High Contracting Parties of the rights set forth in the Convention or the Protocols thereto. The High Contracting Parties undertake not to hinder in any way the effective exercise of this right.” As far as Article 34 of the Convention setting forth the list of the individual applicants which does not contain a phrase “legal person”, we have to consider under which category of individual applicants it may fall. Theoretically, a legal person may be seen as any of these categories of the applicants. Let us start with the category of “person”. If we have a look at the English version of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention (“Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions.”), it can be seen that the term “person” can signify both a physical and legal person. In the Czech version of Article 34 of the Convention, however, the term “person” is narrowly construed only as a “natural person”. Likewise, the second authentic text of this Article of the Convention in French uses the term “personne physique”. The translation of the word “person” with the meaning “individual” can also be found in the Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Italian versions of the Convention. In a broader sense, when the term was translated into Ukrainian and Polish, it only had the meaning of “person”. It would, of course, be possible to compare the language versions of all forty-seven Member States and count in which versions the word “person” was translated as a wider notion, which may include legal persons, and in which it was not. Nevertheless, such a comparison would not be of any legal importance, since there are only two official versions of the Convention: English and French. They have the same legal value and unfortunately these two official versions disagree on the subject. The second possibility is the category of the “non-governmental organisation”. In the case of Times Newspaper Ltd, The Sunday Times, Harold Evans v. The United Kingdom , the Court directly stated that the Times Newspapers Ltd was a legal entity as a non-governmental organization: “Times Newspapers Ltd is a legal person under English law, a company with corporate capacity and limited liability, created by registration under the relevant statute. As such it falls clearly within one of the categories of petitioners set out in Art. 25 of the Convention as a ‘ non- governmental organisation’ ”. The original text of the current Article 34 of the Convention was set forth in Article 25 of the Convention. After the reform of the Court in 1994, the numbering of the Articles of the Convention was changed. This allows us to conclude that the term “legal person” and the applicant for the purposes of individual application are synonyms. The term “non-governmental organisation” in the Convention system has an autonomous meaning and refers to any unit which is independent of the government, no matter whether it is profitable or not with or without legal existence. In most of its judgments or decisions, however, the Court does not strictly separate the terms “person” and “non-governmental organisation”. In general,

EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION

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