NGOs under European Convention on Human Rights / Tymofeyeva

No. 12 (general prohibition of discrimination). 1136 The rights under Protocols 1 and 12 to the Convention may be, in theory, applicable to Article 34 NGOs in any state party to these treaties. As to the rights under Protocol 7, as mentioned before, they may be bestowed on Article 34 NGOs under the condition that national legislation on corporate criminal liability exists or when the sanction applied to them is ‘criminal’ in the sense of the Convention. This means that the usage of these norms is less frequent. Taking into account possible changes in legislation of the CoE member states and the growth of the Court’s practice, it is possible that Article 34 NGOs may also raise complaints under other Articles of the Convention, for instance, under Article 1 of Protocol No. 4 (prohibition of imprisonment for debt). The issue of corporate criminal liability is a relatively new phenomenon. In most of the European countries, the legislation on criminal liability of legal persons was adopted only after the year 2000. 1137 Legal orders of some parties to the Convention do not contain such provisions at all. Therefore, Article 34 NGOs started to use their guarantees under Article 7 of the Convention and criminal proceeding guarantees under Protocol No. 7 comparatively recently. If we consider the summer 2014 finding of the Court, in the case of Centre for Legal Resources on behalf of Valentin Câmpeanu v. Romania [GC], 1138 where it held that an NGO lodging a complaint with the Court on behalf of an individual may complain of a violation to the right to life, we may now suppose that, in a comparable situation, an Article 34 NGO may allege a violation of any provision of the Convention. Therefore, it is not clear, to which extent their rights may be limited in the future. This study includes only those rights on which the author was able to find corresponding case law of the Court. The first part in this section will focus on Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention, namely the right to enjoyment of property. This is the most direct provision for Article 34 NGOs in the Protocols at issue.

1136 Savez crkava “Riječ života”, cited above. 1137 TYMOFEYEVA, A. Some guarantees …, cited above, p. 153-169. 1138 Centre for Legal Resources [GC], cited above.

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