ŽDANOKA v. LATVIA JUDGMENT
35
and prosecutor, on the ground of their former KGB employment was not
considered to amount to an interference with their rights under Article 10 of
the Convention (ibid., §§ 67-73).
112. It is also relevant in this context to note that Article 3 of Protocol
No. 1, or indeed other Convention provisions, do not prevent, in principle,
Contracting States from introducing general policy schemes by way of
legislative measures whereby a certain category or group of individuals is
treated differently from others, provided that the interference with the rights
of the statutory category or group as a whole can be justified under the
Convention (see, in the context of a legislative ban on a police officer from
engaging in political activities, examined by the Court under Articles 10
and 11 of the Convention, Rekvényi, cited above, §§ 34-50 and 58-62).
113. In Rekvényi, no violation of the Convention was found in that the
domestic legislation in issue was judged to be sufficiently clear and precise
as to the definition of the categories of persons affected (members of the
armed forces, police and security services) and as to the scope of the
application of the impugned statutory restriction, the statute’s underlying
purpose of excluding the whole group from political activities being
compatible with the proportionality requirements under Articles 10 and 11
of the Convention. It was thus immaterial for the Court’s assessment of the
compatibility of the impugned measures with the Convention whether or not
the applicant in that case could have requested the domestic courts to
scrutinise whether his own political involvement represented a possible
danger to the democratic order (ibid.). Similarly, in Podkolzina and
Melnychenko, both cited above, the Court did not state that the Convention
required that the domestic courts be empowered to review matters such as
the proportionality of the statutory obligations imposed on those applicants
to comply with, respectively, language and residence requirements in order
to exercise their rights to stand as candidates for election, given that those
statutory requirements were in themselves perfectly acceptable from the
Convention point of view.
114. It follows from the above analysis that, as long as the statutory
distinction itself is proportionate and not discriminatory as regards the
whole category or group specified in the legislation, the task of the domestic
courts may be limited to establishing whether a particular individual
belongs to the impugned statutory category or group. The requirement for
“individualisation”, that is the necessity of the supervision by the domestic
judicial authorities of the proportionality of the impugned statutory
restriction in view of the specific features of each and every case, is not a
precondition of the measure’s compatibility with the Convention.