Latvian MEP to get EUR 20,000 over electoral ban

Date: 24/06/04

THE European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the Latvian government should pay €20,000 to the newly elected MEP Tatjana Zdanoka for banning her from participating in local elections because of her communist past.

According to the judgement, Latvian election laws violated Zdanoka's rights to free elections as well as freedom of assembly and association.

Zdanoka, the leader of the leftist For Human Rights in a United Latvia Party, was not allowed to participate in the country's general elections in October 2002. She was also expelled from the municipal government of Riga, the capital, after a court ruled she had been an active member of the local Communist Party after 13 January 1991.

Local election laws prohibit anyone who, after this date, was a member of the Communist Party or any state security, intelligence or counter-intelligence service from seeking public office. These organizations are considered to have actively opposed Latvia's independence after it broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Zdanoka, dubbed the "iron lady of the opposition" and an active defender of Russian minority rights, was allowed to participate in European Parliament elections after a decision of the Latvian parliament, the Saeima, earlier this year but the restrictions are still in place for general and municipal elections.

Zdanoka told European Voice she believes the "witch-hunts have to be stopped". Latvia has three months to send an appeal to the court, but it is as yet unclear whether it will do so.

Latvian Foreign Affairs Minister Rihards Piks said that his country had to evaluate whether the democracy is "sufficiently strong - not just according to formal terms, but in the minds of people" for the laws to be changed.

Oskars Kastens, of the centre-right First Party, said that the Saeima would revoke the bans after the summer holidays, perhaps in time for the next municipal elections in 2005.

The case of a former interior minister Janis Adamsons - who was banned from elections following a court ruling that he was a KGB border guard - is pending in the European Court of Human Rights.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that the Latvian government should pay €20,000 to the newly elected MEP, Tatjana Zdanoka, for banning her from participating in local elections because of her communist past.

http://www.echr.coe.int/Eng/Press/2004/June/ChamberJudgmentZdanokavLatvia.htm http://www.echr.coe.int/Eng/Press/2004/June/ChamberJudgmentZdanokavLatvia.htm

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