ŽDANOKA v. LATVIA JUDGMENT 41 not she had done anything which would justify holding her personally responsible for the CPL’s activities at the material time in 1991, or to reassess the actual danger to the democratic process which might have arisen by allowing her to run for election in view of her past or present conduct (see, by way of contrast, paragraph 75 above). 129. Furthermore, it is not of central importance, for the purpose of justifying the applicant’s inability to run for the national parliament, that she was never prosecuted for a criminal offence and was not one of the fifteen members of parliament who were stripped of their seats (see paragraphs 29 and 75 above). On the contrary, by choosing to bring a criminal prosecution only against the two former leaders of the CPL (see paragraph 32 above) and imposing more lenient restrictions on the political rights of other CPL activists such as the applicant, the Latvian authorities demonstrated a certain flexibility towards the latter group of persons. 130. Moreover, the Court considers irrelevant the question whether the CPL should be regarded as a legal or an illegal organisation during the period after 13 January 1991, given that the subversive nature of its activities was obvious at least from that date (see paragraphs 96, 97 and 120 above). It is clear that the applicant chose to support the CPL’s antidemocratic stance, and her silence in the face of the events at the material time was just as telling as any overt action in support of the CPL’s activities (see paragraphs 123-24 above). 131. Finally, the fact that the impugned statutory measure was not introduced by Parliament immediately after the restoration of Latvian independence does not appear in this case to be crucial, any more than it was in Rekvényi (cited above), where the provision excluding police officers from political activities became effective almost four years after Hungary’s transition to a democratic system. It is not surprising that a newly established democratic legislature should need time for reflection in a period of political turmoil to enable it to consider what measures were required to sustain its achievements. This is all the more so in the case of Latvia, where troops of a foreign country, Russia, remained until 1994 (see Slivenko v. Latvia [GC], no. 48321/99, ECHR 2003-X). Furthermore, the fact that the Latvian parliament enacted the statutory measure only in 1995 cannot be equated with the much more far-reaching restriction of personal rights barring former KGB officers in Lithuania from access to various spheres of employment in the private sector, which were introduced almost a decade after the re-establishment of Lithuanian independence, and which were considered, partly for this reason, disproportionate from the point of view of the Convention (see Sidabras and Džiautas, cited above, ibid.). It cannot therefore be concluded that the fact of Latvia having introduced the measure only in 1995 showed that the State itself did not deem such a restriction to be necessary to protect the democratic process in the country.