55. In Spain v United Kingdom the Court was thus concerned with Gibraltar which is within the territorial scope of both the Community and the European Convention on Human Rights, but with voting rights which the United Kingdom had conferred on persons who were not United Kingdom nationals for the purposes of Community law. The Court had nonetheless to consider the nature of the United Kingdom’s obligation to extend the franchise in European Parliamentary elections to Gibraltar. In Eman and Sevinger, the Court was concerned with Aruba which is outside the territorial scope of the Community, but within the territorial scope of the European Convention on Human Rights (by the combination of declarations dated 29 November 1954 and 24 December 1985 deposited by the Netherlands with the Council of Europe), and with voting rights which had been withheld from persons who were citizens of the European Union. 56. What is notably absent from the Court of Justice’s judgments in both Spain v United Kingdom and Eman and Sevinger is any suggestion that, by reason of article 6.2 of the pre-December 2009 TEU and articles 17 and 190 EC, the European Treaties confer on citizens of the Union an individual right to vote, the scope and conditions of which must be measured by reference to the principles established in European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence, such as Hirst (No 2) and Scoppola. If available, that could have been advanced as a reason why it was obligatory under European Community law for the United Kingdom to take steps to enable the Gibraltar electorate to vote. Instead, the reason given was the United Kingdom’s Council of Europe obligations to comply with Strasbourg decisions: see para 49 above. Likewise, in Scoppola there was no suggestion that as Union citizens the claimants were under Community law entitled to enjoy an individual right to vote, complying with the principles established by European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence. 57. Advocate General Tizzano in his opinion for these two cases had adopted much broader reasoning which the Court in its judgments was careful not to endorse. He would have “inferred from Community principles and legislation as a whole …. that there is an obligation to grant the voting rights in question to citizens of the Member States and, consequently, to citizens of the Union” (para 67), deriving this (para 69) from “the principles of democracy on which the Union is based, and in particular, to use the words of the Strasbourg Court, the principle of universal suffrage which ‘has become the basic principle’ in modern democratic States [FN: Eur. Court H.R. Mathieu-Mohin and Clerfayt v Belgium, judgment of 2 March 1987 …. , Hirst v United Kingdom (No 2), …. 30 March 2004] and is also codified within the Community legal order in Article 190(1) EC and Article 1 of the 1976 Act, which specifically provide that the members of the European Parliament are to be elected by ‘direct universal suffrage’.” Page 30

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