2 ORLOVSKAYA ISKRA v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT were listed as the applicant organisation’s founders. This information was specified on the front page of the newspaper. 6. Pursuant to the Articles of incorporation, the founders were in charge of setting up an editorial board and determining the editorial policy; in the case of disagreement on the editorial policy the matter was to be resolved by a meeting of the founders’ representatives. 7. During the election campaign for the State Duma, the lower chamber of Parliament, on 2 December 2007, the applicant organisation expressed to the Electoral Committee of the Orel Region (see paragraph 41 below) its intention to accept proposals for publication for a fee and, as required by law, published the fees applicable to the publications on behalf of political parties (30,000 roubles (RUB) per page). The applicant organisation specified that the above fee “was not applicable to the newspaper’s founder”. The applicant organisation signed a contract with the Communist Party for this purpose for publications on 7, 14, 21 and 28 November 2007. The contract mentioned a fee of RUB 30,000 per page; the total amount of the contract was RUB 300,000 for ten pages. Some of the publications in the applicant organisation’s newspaper on these dates did mention the Party’s sponsorship, others did not (see paragraph 8 below). A. Administrative offence case 8. Apart from the publications mentioned above, on 7 and 14 November 2007 the applicant organisation’s newspaper also published, in the same weekly issues, two articles written by its staff correspondent, Ms O. Both articles were critical of Mr Stroyev, the then governor of the Orel Region and the former Chairman of the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament). Governor Stroyev was a candidate at those elections: he was no. 1 on the regional list of United Russia (Единая Россия), a political party aligned with President Putin and dominant in the State Duma. The Communist Party was one of the main opposition parties at those elections. 9. The first article was entitled ‘Hatred, Stroyev style’. It can be summarised as follows. It described Governor Stroyev as a person consumed by hatred towards people who oppose him. The journalist referred to the decision of the governor to wind up a publicly owned newspaper, Gorod Orel. According to journalist O., that decision was a direct consequence of a conflict between Mr Stroyev and the newspaper’s former editor-in-chief who kept criticising Stroyev’s policies. The speaker of the municipal council, who was politically weak owing to a corruption scandal involving municipal land, was unable to oppose the decision of the governor to close the newspaper. Most of the regional journalists under Stroyev became servile; those few who, like the editor-in-chief of Gorod Orel, remained independent and refused to flatter Mr Stroyev, were