NGOs under European Convention on Human Rights / Tymofeyeva

The Court also found a violation of Article 11 of the Convention 995 when the state authorities refused to register a political party respecting fundamental democratic principles in the case of Partidul Comunistilor (Nepeceristi) and Ungureanu v. Romania . 996 The application in this case was lodged by a political group named Partidul Comunistilor (Nepeceristi) and by its chairman. It must be mentioned that though the applicant party contained the word ‘communist’ in its title, its members never participated in the activities of the Romanian Communist Party. Moreover, they had not been politically active before applying for registration. Domestic courts refused to register the group as a political party, referring to its constitution and political programme. They considered that the applicant was seeking to establish a humane, democratic society founded on communist doctrine. In their opinion, such a program implied that the party regarded the constitutional and legal order that was presently in place Romania to be inhumane and undemocratic. Clearly, in this case the interference, entailed by refusing to enter the group in the special register for political parties, was ‘prescribed by law’ and had pursued the aims of protecting national security and the rights and freedoms of others. The question was whether the interference had been necessary in a democratic society. The Court focused on the applicant’s political programme and constitution since they had formed the basis for the national courts’ decisions. It observed that these documents stressed the importance of upholding the country’s national sovereignty, territorial integrity and legal and constitutional order, as well as the other principles of democracy. On the contrary, the statutes did not contain any passages that might be considered a call for the use of violence, an uprising or any other form of rejection of democratic principles, or for the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Moreover, in the programme they had distanced themselves from the former Communist Party’s abuses. In view of the fact that the national courts had failed to establish that the applicants’ political programme was incompatible with a ‘democratic society’, the refusal to register the group as a political party, before its activities had even started, had not met a ‘pressing social need’ and was disproportionate to the aim pursued. In a number of cases, natural persons complained about a refusal to register political parties. 997 In view of the autonomous meaning of the termNGO in Article 34, which does not require the formal existence of a subject, we decided to also include cases where the complaint was lodged with the Court by only one individual, but it was clear that there were a number of individuals aiming to establish a new political party. A bright example is the case of Linkov v. the Czech Republic . 998 The Court in the instant case ruled that the refusal to register a political party on the ground that one of its aims was anti-constitutional presented an infringement of Article 11 of 995 BUYSE, A. and HAMILTON, M. Transitional Jurisprudence and the ECHR: Justice, Politics and Rights. Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 153. 996 Partidul Comunistilor (Nepeceristi) , cited above. 997 MACHETTI, P. and ROCA, J. Europe of rights: a compendium on the European Convention of Human Rights . Boston : Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2012, p. 415. 998 Linkov , cited above.

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