Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 86
May 2006
Antonenko v. Russia (dec.) - 42482/02
Decision 23.5.2006 [Section I]
Article 3 of Protocol No. 1
Stand for election
Candidate barred from standing in local elections on the eve of the voting day: inadmissible
On 15 December 2001 at 10.40 p.m., on the eve of the voting day, and following a complaint by a private individual, a city court disqualified the applicant from standing for the city legislature because of financial irregularities and unfair electoral campaigning. By law, these grounds were sufficient to cancel the registration of the applicant as a candidate and the judgment was final and enforceable with immediate effect. At 7.45 a.m. on the voting day, the electoral commission ordered the applicant’s name to be struck out of the list of candidates. Whilst his name on the information stand was crossed out without delay, the manual correction of the voting ballot papers was completed only one hour later. In unrelated subsequent proceedings the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation held that that the relevant provision of the Code of Civil Procedure was incompatible with a constitutional right to the effective judicial protection in so far as it provided for finality and immediate effect of judgments concerning violations of electoral rights, without affording the aggrieved party a possibility to lodge an appeal against them. In March 2002 the applicant, relying on the Constitutional Court’s decision, lodged a notice of appeal against the judgment of December 2001. He challenged the factual findings and alleged a number of procedural defects. He claimed, in particular, that he had not been duly notified of the complaint against him, that no copy of the complaint had been communicated to him and that the court had delivered its judgment ”in the night time”, according to the definitions in the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Labour Code. On 26 March 2002 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upheld the judgment of December 2001.
Inadmissible: Before the European Court the applicant had not contested the domestic court’s findings of fact that had led to his disqualification. Nor had he claimed that the eligibility conditions relating to comprehensive financial disclosure or fair electoral campaigning had disproportionately restricted the very essence of his right to stand for election. The then effective Elections Act had provided that cancellation of a candidate’s registration should take place no later than on the day preceding the voting day. If the poll was due in fewer than sixteen days, a decision on the candidate’s disqualification could only be made by a court of general jurisdiction. In the present case the judgment cancelling the applicant’s registration had been issued by a city court on the day preceding the poll. Where a final date for issuing a decision was fixed, the rules of civil procedure permitted its delivery until midnight on that day. The city court had complied with this requirement and neither the Convention nor the domestic law imposed any specific schedule for the functioning of the courts. Hence the decision on the applicant’s disqualification had been issued within the time-limit established by domestic law. Moreover, under the then effective rules of civil procedure, the judgment was final from the moment of its delivery and had immediate effect. No further appeal lay against it and the applicant could not have expected to obtain a new determination of the same issues. Such a possibility emerged only subsequent to the election, following the Constitutional Court’s ruling in unrelated proceedings to which the applicant was not a party. In the overall circumstances, the fact that his disqualification had been ordered by a court shortly before the opening of polling stations could not have violated his right to stand for election. In so far as the applicant complained that insufficient information on his disqualification had been made available to voters, the applicant had not shown how, if at all, the alleged failure to give information to voters could have impinged on his right to stand for election. Manifestly ill-founded.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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