40 MAGYAR KÉTFARKÚ KUTYA PÁRT v. HUNGARY JUDGMENT 113. The Court cannot but note that the NEC and the Kúria, in their examination of all the circumstances of the case at hand, disagreed as to the applicability of the basic principles of electoral procedure. The NEC relied on section 2(1)(e) read in conjunction with section 2(1)(a) of the EPA, arguing that the MKKP’s conduct jeopardised the fairness of elections and the secrecy of the voting process. For its part, the Kúria explicitly dismissed this line of argument, finding that the secrecy of the ballot had not been infringed as the mobile application had not allowed access to the personal data of the users and had thus been incapable of linking a cast ballot to a voter. It further found that the MKKP’s conduct had had no material impact on the fairness of the national referendum and had not been capable of shaking public confidence in the work of the electoral bodies. It remained however unestablished how the impugned restriction, based as it was on the principle of the exercise of rights in accordance with their purpose, related to, and addressed, a concrete “negative consequence”, whether potential or actual. 114. Finally, in so far as the Government relied on the NEC Guidelines as clarification to the effect that the taking of ballot photographs was in breach of the principle in question, the Court notes that those Guidelines expressed the NEC’s view on the interpretation of the basic principles of electoral procedure. They were issued for the electoral bodies and were not legally binding but served exclusively as guidance (see section 51 of the EPA in paragraph 32 above). The Court notes, moreover, that it was only after the referendum that the relevance and the legal effects of the NEC Guidelines in the present circumstances were clarified by the Kúria (see paragraph 26 above). This certainly did not contribute to the foreseeability of the impugned restriction in the present case. 115. The present case was apparently the first in which the domestic authorities applied the principle of the exercise of rights in accordance with their purpose to the use of a mobile application for posting ballot photographs in an anonymous manner. As noted above, this does not, as such, make the interpretation of the law unforeseeable, as there must come a day when a given legal norm is applied for the first time (see paragraph 97 above). 116. However, having regard to the particular importance of the foreseeability of the law when it comes to restricting the freedom of expression of a political party in the context of an election or a referendum (see paragraphs 99 and 100 above), the Court takes the view that the considerable uncertainty about the potential effects of the impugned legal provisions applied by the domestic authorities exceeded what is acceptable under Article 10 § 2 of the Convention.