candidates to be members of parties or of specific parties.268 The IACtHR has recently admitted a case of Nasry Javier Ictech Guifarrao v Honduras 269 challenging the refusal of Honduras to register the applicant’s independent candidacy in the local elections. In its submission, Honduras indicated that the applicant failed to submit all necessary documents required by the Electoral and Political Organizations Law; besides the law did not permit the registration of independent candidates. Whether the IACtHR would consider a state’s refusal to register independent candidates in local elections as a violation of the right to political participation remains to be determined, as there has not yet been a ruling from the IACtHR. Despite international courts’ strong stance on procedural guarantees, where access of minorities to standing in elections was barred due to linguistic restrictions, their interpretation has been less generous. By way of example, in the inadmissibility decision in Fryske Nasjonale Partij and Others v the Netherlands,270 the ECmHR established that the applicants whose names had been struck off a list of candidates for appearing in a minority language, could not claim a violation of Article 3 of Protocol 1. In the ECmHR’s view the applicants were not as such prevented from standing as candidates; it was rather problems related to the language in which the registration took place. The candidates could simply submit a translation of their names to the authorities. The ECtHR took a similar approach in MathieuMohin and Clerfayt v Belgium,271 by declaring that Belgium did not violate the political rights of the members of the French-speaking minority who became ineligible for membership in the Flemish Community Council because they took their parliamentary oaths in French. The ECtHR ruled that the principle of territoriality was essential to preserve a balance between different regions in Belgium, and therefore there was no discrimination against the applicants: the essence of their right to stand for elections and to be elected was not violated.272 Another argument which states used to justify excluding minorities from standing for elections is a lack of loyalty to the state. For example, in Ždanoka v Latvia,273 the applicant was permanently disqualified from standing for elections because of her work for the Communist Party of Latvia (CPL) during Latvia’s transition to independence between January and September 1991. On 17 June 2004, the First Section of the ECtHR reviewed the proportionality of the applicant’s permanent disqualification from standing for elections and found that it impaired the essence of the applicant’s rights under the Protocol. However, in 2007, the Grand Chamber of the ECtHR found no violation of Article 3 of Protocol 1 ECHR.274 The Grand Chamber ruled that states may impose stricter requirements on eligibility to stand for election to parliament than on the exercise of voting rights. Therefore, the ECtHR’s review was limited to checking the absence of arbitrariness in domestic procedures to disqualify possible candidates.275 In the view of most judges, the applicant’s active participation in the CPL rendered her exclusion from standing for a seat in the national parliament logical and proportionate.276 Significantly, the ECtHR’s recent jurisprudence on political participation of minorities has been strengthened through more confident application of the principle of nondiscrimination. This trend started in Aziz v Cyprus. In Aziz, the applicant complained that, in the exercise of his voting rights, he had been discriminated against on account of his national origin and association with a national minority, in breach of Article 14 ECHR read together with Article 3 of Protocol 1.277 Since 1964, the Cypriot government had adopted laws which benefited the Greek Cypriots only, without safeguarding the rights of the Turkish Cypriots. As a result, the applicant and thousands of other Turkish Cypriots were deprived of their right to vote or stand for elections.278 The government rejected these claims by submitting that the applicant was not in a comparable situation to voters who belonged to the Greek-Cypriot community.279 The ECtHR concluded that there was no reasonable and objective justification for the differential treatment of Turkish Cypriots and found a separate breach of Article 14 in conjunction with Article 3 of Protocol 1. Case study: Sejdić and Finci v Bosnia and Herzegovina Even more far-reaching conclusions regarding political participation of minorities stem from the recent cases of Sejdić and Finci v Bosnia and Herzegovina,280 which allowed the Court to crystallize its case law on nondiscrimination under Article 14 ECHR read in conjunction with Article 3 of Protocol 1. The cases concern the compatibility of the domestic legislation of BosniaHerzegovina, which prevents persons not belonging to one of the three constituent peoples (Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats) from standing for election to the Presidency and the House of Peoples of the Parliamentary Assembly, with the ECHR rights. In its assessment, the ECtHR observed that eligibility for standing in elections for the House of Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina is based on affiliation with one of the ‘constituent peoples’. As a result, the applicants, who are of Roma and Jewish origin respectively, are excluded. This exclusion is a result of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement – the culmination of some 44 months of intermittent negotiations under the auspices of the MINORITY GROUPS AND LITIGATION: A REVIEW OF DEVELOPMENTS IN INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL JURISPRUDENCE 27