40 GORZELIK AND OTHERS v. POLAND JUDGMENT registration of the association – serve to prevent its members from acquiring special electoral status (see paragraphs 36 and 42-43 above). Had registration been granted, a decision by the applicants to run as candidates in elections as members of the association would, as the Government have pointed out (see paragraph 86 above), have been no more than a legitimate exercise of their political rights. In consequence, the Court is not convinced that any of the drastic measures available under the Law on associations, such as annulment of a resolution to put up candidates in elections or dissolution of the association, which could be imposed only if “such a resolution [was] contrary to the law or the provisions of the memorandum of association” or “if its activities ... demonstrated a flagrant or repeated failure to comply with the law or with the provisions of the memorandum of association” (see paragraph 40 above), would have been applicable and, therefore, susceptible of avoiding the particular mischief which the authorities were seeking to avoid. 102. The Court will accordingly proceed on the understanding, which was the basis of the judgment by the Polish Supreme Court, that under Polish law the registration of the applicants' association as an “organisation of a national minority” was capable by itself of setting in motion a chain of further events that would lead, subject only to voluntary actions by the association and its members, to the acquisition of electoral privileges. In other words, the risk that the association and its members might claim electoral privileges was inherent in any decision that allowed them to form the association without first amending paragraph 30 of the memorandum of association. 103. That being so, the appropriate time for countering the risk of the perceived mischief, and thereby ensuring that the rights of other persons or entities participating in parliamentary elections would not actually be infringed, was at the moment of registration of the association and not later. The Court does not therefore subscribe to the applicants' analysis of the impugned measure as being one of prior restraint in anticipation of any action which the association might or might not take in future and which could as well have been controlled by the exercise of the authorities' supervisory powers under sections 25 and 26 of the Law on associations. In reality, imposing as a condition for registration of the association that the reference to an “organisation of a national minority” be removed from paragraph 30 of the memorandum of association was no more than the legitimate exercise by the Polish courts of their power to control the lawfulness of this instrument, including the power to refuse any ambiguous or misleading clause liable to lead to an abuse of the law – in the event, a clause which would create for the association and its members a capacity, which could not be impeded, to enjoy electoral privileges to which they were not entitled (see the reasoning of the Supreme Court quoted in paragraph 36 above).