6
SAMADBAYLI AND OTHERS v. AZERBAIJAN JUDGMENT
“The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in [the] Convention shall be
secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language,
religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a
national minority, property, birth or other status.”
27. The Court notes that this complaint is linked to the one examined
above and must therefore likewise be declared admissible.
28. However, in the light of its above finding concerning Article 3 of
Protocol No. 1, the Court considers that it is not necessary to examine
whether in this case there has been a violation of Article 14 (compare
Gahramanli and Others, cited above, §§ 89-91).
V. ALLEGED VIOLATION OF ARTICLE 34 OF THE CONVENTION
29. In a fax dated 9 September 2014 Mr I. Aliyev, the applicants’
representative, introduced a new complaint on behalf of the applicants. He
claimed that the seizure from his office of all case files relating to the
applicants’ pending cases before the Court, together with all his other case
files, had amounted to a hindrance to the exercise of the applicants’ right of
individual application under Article 34 of the Convention, the relevant parts
of which read as follows:
“The Court may receive applications from any person, non-governmental
organisation or group of individuals claiming to be the victim of a violation by one of
the High Contracting Parties of the rights set forth in the Convention or the Protocols
thereto. The High Contracting Parties undertake not to hinder in any way the effective
exercise of this right.”
A. The parties’ submissions
30. The submissions made by the applicants, the Government and the
third party, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), were identical to
those made by the relevant parties in respect of the same complaint raised in
Annagi Hajibeyli v. Azerbaijan (cited above, §§ 57-63).
B. The Court’s assessment
31. In Annagi Hajibeyli, having examined an identical complaint based
on the same facts, the Court found that the respondent State had failed to
comply with its obligations under Article 34 of the Convention (ibid.,
§§ 64-79). The Court considers that the analysis and the finding made in the
Annagi Hajibeyli judgment also apply to the present case and sees no reason
to deviate from the finding that the deprivation of access for the applicants
and their lawyer to their copies of the case files constituted in itself an
undue interference and a serious hindrance to the effective exercise of the
applicants’ right of individual petition.