22 NAMAT ALIYEV v. AZERBAIJAN JUDGMENT that the parliamentary majority party could only directly nominate one-third of the members of each commission, while the majority of at least two-thirds of commission members' votes was required by law for adoption of any commission decisions. Although by law every chairperson of every commission was elected from among the representatives of the ruling party, this did not affect the decision-making process within the commission as the chairperson did not possess a decisive or tie-breaking vote. The Government concluded that electoral commissions were generally independent and impartial and that, in any event, there could have been no lack of impartiality in the present case, as the applicant's opponent, Z.O., was not even a member of the ruling party. 66. The applicant submitted that he had been unable to benefit from an environment in which elections were free and fair and that the relevant State authorities had not duly reacted to the existence of numerous infringements of the electoral law in his constituency. He reiterated his allegations concerning specific instances of alleged irregularities that had taken place in his constituency and maintained that the sheer scale of these irregularities undermined the free expression of the opinion of the people voting in the constituency. In support of his arguments, the applicant also relied heavily on a number of reports by international organisations and mass media sources which contained general criticism of the various aspects of the parliamentary elections of 6 November 2005 in Azerbaijan. 67. The applicant further maintained that those irregularities prejudiced the outcome of the election. Had all his allegations been examined and assessed fairly, his corrected official vote total would have actually been higher than that of Z.O. and he would have won the election. 68. The applicant argued that he had been unable to obtain an effective examination of his election-related complaints. Again, relying heavily on excerpts from various reports and recommendations concerning the elections of 6 November 2005 prepared by various observation missions, he argued that, in general, there had been many shortcomings in how the existing mechanism for addressing election-related complaints functioned in practice. As to his specific case, he argued that he had presented sufficient evidence to the domestic electoral commissions and courts in support of his claims, but the latter had used formal grounds in order to avoid examining the essence of his complaints and had not given him an opportunity to submit duly certified copies of the relevant evidence, if this was deemed absolutely necessary. 69. Lastly, the applicant claimed that in reality the majority of members of every electoral commission at every level were either the direct nominees of the ruling party or “persons supporting the ruling party”. The applicant appeared to imply (without clearly stating it) that commission members formally nominated by non-partisan members of parliament were usually, in practice, pro-ruling-party persons, albeit not formally affiliated with the