SAVICKIS AND OTHERS v. LATVIA JUDGMENT concerned the inclusion of the employment periods accrued in the territory of the former USSR but had not mentioned the periods of compulsory military service. Furthermore, the applicant had not submitted to the domestic authorities any documents allowing them to establish the country where that service had been carried out. Accordingly, in so far as it concerned the exclusion of the compulsory military service, the second applicant’s complaint should be rejected for non-exhaustion of domestic remedies or as manifestly ill-founded. 139. The applicants responded that there were no effective domestic remedies with respect to the periods of compulsory military service. As Latvian citizens had only to prove the fact of service, they could obtain the inclusion of those periods by showing their employment record and their military identity card. Those documents indicated the territory from where the person had been conscripted but not the location where the compulsory military service had been served. In contrast, a “permanently resident non-citizen” was required to prove the exact location of the military service. For that purpose, he was required to contact the archives of the respective foreign armed forces, for a fee, without necessarily having the corresponding linguistic abilities and with no certainty that such data were available. (ii) The Court’s assessment 140. The Court notes at the outset that the respondent Government themselves have asserted the ineffectiveness of the reopening requests brought by the applicants before the administrative courts for the purposes of Article 35 § 1 of the Convention (see paragraph 124 above). That being so, the Government’s assertion that the applicants should have raised a particular point of fact by way of that same procedure seems unsustainable. In any event, the Court reiterates that non-exhaustion of domestic remedies cannot be held against an applicant if, in spite of the latter’s alleged failure to observe the forms prescribed by law, the competent authority has nevertheless examined the substance of the exact claim that he or she is bringing before the Court (see Vladimir Romanov v. Russia, no. 41461/02, § 52, 24 July 2008, and Ulemek v. Croatia, no. 21613/16, § 77, 31 October 2019). In the present case, it appears that the Constitutional Court had declared the second applicant’s constitutional complaint procedurally admissible in its entirety and examined it with regard to all the disputed periods, without distinguishing between them (see paragraph 51 above). In these circumstances, the applicant cannot be blamed for not exhausting the domestic remedies, and the respondent Government’s objection must be dismissed. 49