SAVICKIS AND OTHERS v. LATVIA JUDGMENT USSR and they had had no expectation that Latvia would assume responsibility for those periods. Therefore, the applicants could not claim that the Latvian domestic law or practice had ever created any legitimate expectation that Latvia would assume responsibility for the payment of retirement pensions for work carried out under the jurisdiction of other States. Nor had such an expectation been created by the Court’s judgment in Andrejeva, given that the Court’s ruling had been based on the individual circumstances of that specific case. (ii) The applicants 118. The applicants noted that this objection had already been dismissed by the Grand Chamber in the case of Andrejeva, cited above. They pointed out that Paragraph 1 of the transitional provisions of the State Pensions Act had created an entitlement to a retirement pension in respect of the employment and equivalent periods accrued prior to 1991 in the territory of the former USSR, but had reserved this right to the citizens of Latvia. By virtue of this provision the applicants had been refused a pension for those periods solely because they did not have Latvian citizenship. Had the applicants been Latvian citizens, the respective employment and equivalent periods accrued in the territory of the former USSR would be taken into account in calculating their “insurance period”, which was subsequently used to determine the entitlement to state pensions and the amount thereof. Hence, the applicants’ pecuniary interests fell within the scope of Article 1 of Protocol No.1, which rendered Article 14 applicable. (b) The Court’s assessment 119. As a preliminary point, the Court reiterates that, as the question of applicability of a particular provision of the Convention or its Protocols is an issue of the Court’s jurisdiction ratione materiae, the general rule of dealing with applications should be respected and the relevant analysis should be carried out at the admissibility stage unless there is a particular reason to join this question to the merits. No such particular reason exists in the present case and the issue of the applicability of Article 14 of the Convention, read in conjunction with Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, falls therefore to be decided at the admissibility stage (see Popović and Others v. Serbia, nos. 26944/13 and 3 others, § 46, 30 June 2020, and, mutatis mutandis, Denisov v. Ukraine [GC], no. 76639/11, § 93, 25 September 2018). 120. The Court reiterates that Article 14 of the Convention complements the other substantive provisions of the Convention and its Protocols. It has no independent existence since it has effect solely in relation to “the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms” safeguarded thereby. Although the application of Article 14 does not presuppose a breach of those provisions – and to this extent it is autonomous – there can be no room for its application unless the 42