TĂNASE v. MOLDOVA JUDGMENT 21 I. PRELIMINARY OBJECTIONS A. Victim status 1. The Chamber’s conclusions 96. The Chamber referred to the Court’s previous case-law to the effect that it was open to a person to contend that a Law violated his rights in the absence of an individual measure of implementation if he was required to modify his conduct or was a member of a class of people who risked being directly affected by the legislation. It considered that the applicant was directly affected by Law no. 273 because, if elected, he would have to make the difficult choice between sitting as an MP or keeping his dual nationality. Indeed, awareness of that difficult choice could have an adverse effect on the applicant’s electoral campaign, both in terms of his personal investment and effort and in terms of the risk of losing votes with the electorate. The Chamber therefore dismissed the Government’s objection that the applicant lacked victim status. 2. The parties’ submissions (a) The Moldovan Government 97. The Government maintained in their submissions to the Grand Chamber that the applicant was not a victim within the meaning of Article 34 of the Convention because the case was lodged with the Court before Law no. 273 had been promulgated. Relying on Očič v. Croatia ((dec.), no. 46306/99, ECHR 1999-VIII), they further contended that the applicant’s claim was an actio popularis seeking review of legislation in the abstract as at the time of his application to the Court, the Law in question had never been applied to him to his detriment. The cases to which the Chamber referred to support its conclusion that the applicant was a victim were distinguished by the Government because, in those cases, unlike in the present case, the Law being challenged had entered into force. Although the Court had considered an applicant a potential victim of an enacted Law which had never been applied to him, it had never before found an applicant to be a victim or a potential victim of a draft law. The Government relied on The Christian Federation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in France v. France ((dec.), no. 53430/99, ECHR 2001-XI), where the Court observed that it had accepted the notion of a potential victim in cases where the applicant was not in a position to demonstrate that the legislation about which he complained had actually been applied to him because of the secret nature of the measures it authorised (see Klass and Others v. Germany, 6 September