46 ANDREJEVA v. LATVIA JUDGMENT – SEPARATE OPINION to cover all “heads of damage”. It is now the reader who is left to speculate about the Court’s view on the nature of the right. 14. The judgment treats the submissions concerning the “jurisdiction” of Latvia for the acts complained of by the applicant as a question relating to the Government’s objections to the admissibility of the case (see paragraph 55 of the judgment). The Government, having explained that neither the former Latvian SSR nor the Republic of Latvia had any control over all-Union enterprises based in the former Ukrainian SSR and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic for which the applicant worked, invited the Court “to conclude that the present case falls outside the jurisdiction of the Republic of Latvia within the meaning of Article 1 of the Convention” (see the Government’s observations, § 19). Of course, this is not a question of jurisdiction strictly speaking, as the Court demonstrates to the Government in this part of the judgment, but it is one of responsibility for events that took place in the USSR. It is clearly an argument on the merits, the conclusion at which the majority finally arrive two paragraphs later (paragraph 57), only to dismiss it without any elaboration as irrelevant in paragraph 78 (see point 16 below). Application of the Convention in isolation from international law 15. The respondent Government explained that the reasons for the distinction drawn in the transitional provisions of the State Pensions Act 1995 had to do with the fact that Latvia had not succeeded to the rights or obligations of the Soviet Union. Latvia was not a successor State to the exUSSR (see paragraphs 52 and 67 of the judgment). It was a State identical to that occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 (see paragraph 52 and the Government’s oral submissions before the Grand Chamber, § 23). It therefore follows that whatever rules of international law applied to domestic decisions after the restoration of independence, they came from the area of prohibition of the use of force and State continuity1. The applicant did not challenge the State continuity argument but said that it was irrelevant since her life had been the same as that of any Latvian citizen during the Soviet times. “Latvia, Russia and Ukraine had formed part of the same State, the Soviet Union” (see paragraph 59 of the judgment) and she should have the same amount of pension that a Latvian citizen in the same position would receive (see paragraph 61). 16. It is a striking feature of this judgment that it chooses to ignore the context of the demise of the Soviet Union and the special status of the Baltic States in international law, namely their long but ultimately unsuccessful 1. On 26 August 2001 the Institute of International Law adopted guiding principles on State Succession in Matters of Property and Debts, defining State continuity as follows: “Continuity means that legal personality under international law subsists despite changes in territory, population, political and legal regime and name.”