ANNAGI HAJIBEYLI v. AZERBAIJAN JUDGMENT 15 prosecution unrestricted discretion in determining which documents to seize, the Court has found that the lawyer’s rights under Article 8 of the Convention had been breached on that ground (see Aleksanyan, cited above, §§ 216-18; Smirnov v. Russia, no. 71362/01, §§ 47-49, 7 June 2007; and Iliya Stefanov v. Bulgaria, no. 65755/01, §§ 41-42, 22 May 2008). 70. The Court notes that Mr Intigam Aliyev has lodged a separate application with the Court (application no. 68672/14) concerning, inter alia, the alleged breach of his rights under Articles 8 and 18 of the Convention by the prosecuting authorities conducting the search and seizure carried out in his home and office and the allegedly abusive intent behind the authorities’ actions leading to his arrest and prosecution. The Court considers that, when deciding the present case, it should avoid prejudging any issues raised in that application, and should therefore leave unaddressed the applicant’s argument in the present case that the institution of criminal proceedings against Mr Aliyev was an act of intentional interference with his legal representation of a number of applicants before the Court and part of a crackdown campaign against human-rights lawyers and activists. Instead, the Court will focus on the narrower issue specific to the present case – whether the fact of the seizure of the applicant’s case file, as such, amounted to a breach of his rights under Article 34 of the Convention. 71. It appears that the case file in question was the applicant’s copy of all the material relating to the application before the Court, including a copy of the original application form with the annexed documents, copies of the Government’s and the applicant’s observations together with all the relevant annexed documents, all the correspondence between the parties and the Court conducted up until the time of the seizure, information on the case number assigned to the application by the Court, barcode labels provided by the Court to the applicant for the purpose of facilitating the correspondence, and so on. The applicant’s case file was in the possession of Mr Aliyev because he was the lawyer representing the applicant before the Court. 72. After the seizure on 9 August 2014, for a period of seventy-six days neither the applicant nor his lawyer had any access to their copy of the case file relating to the application pending before the Court. 73. The Court considers that the principle of effective exercise of the right of individual petition and the principle of the adversarial nature of the proceedings before it require that each party should enjoy unhindered access to copies of all the material relating to the case pending before the Court. Removal from the applicant’s possession of his copy of the case file by the authorities of the respondent State, for whatever reason, constitutes an interference with the integrity of the Court proceedings and requires serious justification and compensatory measures for the Court to consider whether such interference is acceptable. 74. The Court notes that the criminal charges brought against Mr Aliyev were formally unrelated to the present application. The prosecution