THE GEORGIAN LABOUR PARTY v. GEORGIA JUDGMENT 27 resigned, then the corresponding seat was occupied by the next candidate from the same party list. Moreover, by virtue of Article 100 § 2 of the EC, a party or bloc could cancel the nomination of its candidate even after the latter had been elected and formally recognised as an MP. In other words, once a party obtained seats in Parliament under the proportional representation system, those seats did not, under the domestic legislation in force at the material time, impart immutable parliamentary authority to its individual members and, in the event of the cessation of the latter’s parliamentary activities, would nevertheless remain within the party’s possession until the expiry of Parliament’s mandate. 74. Having regard to the above considerations, the Court finds that, in the present case, the applicant party, as a political party, may validly claim victim status under Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 for the purposes of Article 34 of the Convention. B. Voter registration 1. The Government’s submissions 75. The Government asserted that CEC Decree no. 30/2004 of 27 February 2004, amending the voter registration system, was aimed at ensuring that every person was able to cast a vote. The state of the electoral rolls as they stood before the initial parliamentary election of 2 November 2003 – lacking in accuracy and compiled from different handwritten voter lists of dubious origin – was the main reason for the massive falsification of that election’s results. By introducing an active system of voter registration, the CEC, on the contrary, successfully tackled the problem of inaccuracy in the electoral rolls and managed to create a unified list of voters. Regard was to be had to the urgency of the situation in which the CEC was obliged to work, when the results of the previous parliamentary election had been invalidated and the presidential and repeat parliamentary elections were only a few weeks away. The CEC had no other option but to assume responsibility for changing the system of voter registration, in so far as Parliament had failed to do so for lack of time. The Government further noted in this regard that, after the Constitutional Court suspended on 26 December 2003 the EC provisions regulating the time-limits for compiling the voter lists (see paragraph 45 above), the CEC Decree in question was nothing other than an urgent measure aimed at filling the resulting legislative vacuum. 76. The Government stated that the introduction of the active system for voter registration encouraged otherwise passive voters to become more actively involved in the election process. By shifting the burden of registration partly onto the voters, the authorities substantially improved the accuracy of the general electoral list and, consequently, the repeat