52 ŽDANOKA v. LATVIA JUDGMENT – DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE ROZAKIS that policy for democracy is sufficiently established and imminent” (ibid., § 102). The question is whether we are confronted in the present case with a situation bearing (even remote) similarities with that in Refah Partisi, which would justify treating the case in the same way. My answer is categorically negative, for the following reasons. First, the applicant was not allowed to take part in the elections, not because of the imminent threat that she posed to the democratic governance of Latvia at the time when the 1995 Act came into force, but because of her past attitude, and mainly her participation in the 1991 events. Leaving aside the argument of the belated emergence of the 1995 Act, and the gap between the events and its enactment, there was no indication in 1995 that the subversive tendencies of her political milieu which had been present in 1991 were still the same in 1995, or that she herself in 1995 would propagate ideas similar to the ones which had been at the forefront of the 1991 events. But even if we accept – and this is my second observation – that in the circumstances of Latvia’s transition to democracy and its efforts to be disentangled from its recent past, such a harsh measure could have been justified during the first difficult years of adapting to the new regime and for the sake of democratic consolidation, the restrictions have nevertheless not been abolished to date, and this despite the fact that in the meantime Latvia has become a member State of NATO and, more importantly, of the European Union. We are now eleven years away from the date of the Act prohibiting the applicant from standing for election, fifteen years from the events which led to the belated promulgation of the Act, five years from the Constitutional Court’s decision, and almost two years from the election of the applicant to the European Parliament. Last, but not least, the situation of a single candidate for a seat in Parliament differs radically from the situation of a whole political party aspiring to become the government of a country. It is undoubtedly clear from the facts of the case that the applicant was not only an isolated candidate representing ideas shared by only part of the pro-Russian electorate, but also that she belonged to an ideological current which was, in any event, a minority strand within the political spectrum of Latvia. In these circumstances, it is difficult to contend that the election of the applicant to the Latvian parliament would have had adverse effects on the democratic stability of the country. For all these reasons, I consider that the applicant – together with, implicitly, her followers – was unduly deprived of her rights under Article 3 of Protocol No. 1, and that, consequently, there has been a violation of this Article.