22 Official Gazette, Issue 24 App (a) on 14 June 2012 between citizens which is not based on logical principles or criteria, which engenders a separation between the rulings and the aims thereof, making the connection between them illusory, and feeding the distinction which is presented as depending on unfounded events and as artificially creating an unreal distinction between the holders of similar legal positions, rendering it an absolute violation of the principle of equality and the provision of equal opportunities stipulated for in Article (7) of the Constitutional Declaration. The State’s subjugation to the law, determined in light of the concept of democracy, ensures that it does not violate legislation on the rights received in a democratic state, assuming firstly the existence of a state of law and its essential guarantee to uphold the rights and dignity of the people and their complete personhood, under which is integrated a host of rights which are very strongly related to the personal freedom ensured by the Constitutional Declaration in Article (8), which are considered natural infrangible rights. It contradicts the concept of the state of law if the State should decide upon a punishment, either criminal, disciplinary or of a civil nature, with retrospective force, which is implemented for actions which were not considered to constitute a criminal offence, an administrative wrong or a violation requiring compensation at the time when they were committed. Accordingly, the referred text imposes the penalty of deprivation of the exercise of political rights for a period of ten years solely for holding any of the specified posts only, without it being necessary to prove that the person who held any of these positions took any action or course of behavior that merits this penalty. It has been adopted on the basis of an assumption that does not accord with the nature of things or pay heed to notions of justice, and which thus violates the concept of the state of law. From another angle, the imposition of this penalty upon anyone who has held any of these posts during the ten years prior to 11/2/2011 constitutes the imposition of a retrospective penalty. All the provisions of Article (1) of the aforementioned Law No. 17 of 2012 contradict the provisions of the Constitutional Declaration, and this being the case constitute a constitutional violation. If each constitutional violation distorted this text as shown, this in itself would be sufficient for it to be annulled, even without considering the total of all these constitutional defects and without the matter being concealed from the members of the legislative council, as revealed in the relevant minutes of the People’s Assembly, and the inclination of the majority of the council to ignore the issue and its adoption of the draft law which deliberately shuns the purposes which the legislation must intend, a matter which loses it its public character and neutrality, and which tarnishes it with the disgrace of legislative distortion. Accordingly, Article (2) of the aforementioned Law No. 17 of 2012 which relates to the publication of this law in the Official Gazette and the date on which it shall come into effect, cannot be conceived to be independent and separate from the first article whose unconstitutionality has already been decided, given the inseparable connection between the two. Accordingly it therefore becomes invalid along with the first article.