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

v. Turkey (striking out), no. 1444/02, 27 April 2006 and OAO Neftyanaya Kompaniya Yukos v. Russia , no. 14902/04, 20 September 2011). Article 17 of the Convention envisages: “Nothing in this Convention may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein or at their limitation to a greater extent than is provided for in the Convention.” Article 18 set forth limitations on the use of restrictions on rights. The restrictions permitted under the Convention shall not be applied for any purpose other than those for which they have been prescribed. Taking into account a specific nature of these Articles, they will not be covered in this paper. As it was mentioned before, due to the nature of legal persons they may not possess certain rights, for example the right to life. It is impossible to torture legal persons. And it is very hard to imagine how legal persons can marry. Nevertheless, the understanding of a legal person is changing in the theory of law and gradually in the Convention. Only a few decades ago in Europe, it was incredible to prosecute a legal person for a criminal offence. But now the situation has changed and, for example, all the counties of the EU have legislation on corporate criminal liability. 3. CHANGES IN UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURE OF LEGAL PERSONS Public international law more often considers legal persons to be a subject of international law with the corresponding rights and duties . Changes in understanding of the nature of legal persons can also be seen in the case-law of the Court. For example, in the case of Comingersoll S.A. v. Portugal, when dealing with non-pecuniary damage , the government of Portugal contended that the purpose of awarding such compensation is to provide reparation for anxiety, the mental stress of having to wait for the outcome of the case and uncertainty. They submitted that such feelings were peculiar to natural persons and could under no circumstances entitle a juristic person to compensation. The Court disagreed and noted that “non-pecuniary damage suffered by a company may include heads of claim that are to a greater or lesser extent “objective” or “subjective”. Among these, account should be taken of the company‘s reputation, uncertainty in decision-planning, disruption in the management of the company (for which there is no precise method of calculating the consequences) and lastly, albeit to a lesser degree, the anxiety and inconvenience caused to the members of the management team“. This shows us that a legal person is not seen as an artificial entity anymore, but rather as a group of individuals, which are able to suffer. This approach was confirmed by the Court in the case of Association for European Integration and Human Rights and Ekimdzhiev v. Bulgaria , where it confirmed the rights of legal persons under Article 8 of the Convention (right to private and family life) . The applicant association in the present case claimed that, under the Special Surveillance Means Act of 1997, it could be subjected to surveillance measures at any time without notification. The Bulgarian government disputed that legal persons could not have a private or family life within the meaning of Article 8 of the Convention, and that the same was not true of correspondence, in the form of mail or of telephone or electronic communications. The Court again opposed the government and noted: “60. As regards the applicant association, the Court notes that it has already held that a legal person is entitled to respect for its “home” within the meaning of Article 8 § 1 of the Convention (see Société Colas Est and Others v. France , no. 37971/97, § 41, ECHR 2002‑III; Buck v. Germany , no. 41604/98, § 31, 28 April 2005; and Kent Pharmaceuticals Limited and Others v. the United Kingdom (dec.), no. 9355/03, 11 October 2005). The applicant association is therefore, contrary to what the Government suggest, not wholly deprived of the protection of Article 8 by the mere fact that it is a legal person. While it may be open to doubt whether, being such a person, it can have a “private life” within the meaning of that provision, it can be said that its mail and other communications, which are in issue in the present case, are covered by the notion of “correspondence” which applies equally to communications originating from private and

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