ANDREJEVA v. LATVIA JUDGMENT 25 to their share of the fund for it to qualify as a “possession” within the meaning of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1. 67. The former system, on the other hand, had been non-contributory and based on the solidarity principle, which entailed the responsibility of the community as a whole and was characterised by the lack of a direct link between the amount received by beneficiaries and the contributions paid by their employer. The Government therefore disputed that the applicant had had a “legitimate expectation” creating a pecuniary right for the purposes of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1. Under the previous system, individuals had not been entitled to claim a precise, identifiable amount of retirement pension; they could only have a vague hope that the State would award them an amount of some kind, to the extent that its budget allowed. Furthermore, even if there had been a certain expectation in this regard, it had been valid only in the context of a single State, the USSR, which had ceased to exist and to which Latvia was not the successor. Accordingly, the applicant’s claim in the instant case was insufficiently tangible to constitute a “possession” within the meaning of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1. That Article was therefore not applicable to the portion of retirement pensions calculated in respect of periods of employment before 1991, and Article 14 of the Convention was likewise not applicable. 68. The Government acknowledged that in Koua Poirrez v. France (no. 40892/98, ECHR 2003-X) the Court had refused to make a distinction between contributory and non-contributory welfare benefits, finding that Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 was also applicable to the latter category and, subsequently, that there had been a violation of Article 14 of the Convention. However, in the Government’s submission, there were significant differences between the present case and Koua Poirrez. Firstly, the State pension claimed by the applicant in the instant case did not amount to “emergency assistance” in that it was not her sole source of income. Secondly, Mr Koua Poirrez had quite simply been refused the allowance he had sought, whereas Ms Andrejeva did receive a certain amount of retirement pension. 69. The Government observed that in its judgment of 6 October 1999 the Senate of the Supreme Court had accepted that the fact of having worked for an entity established outside Latvian territory while remaining physically present in Latvia did not constitute “employment in the territory of Latvia” within the meaning of paragraph 1 of the transitional provisions of the State Pensions Act. In the Government’s submission, such an interpretation was entirely reasonable, seeing that during the period in question the applicant’s employment had not been governed by the law of the Latvian SSR. The Government pointed out that the provision in issue was based on the territorial principle; accordingly, periods of employment for allUnion enterprises “which were under the territorial jurisdiction of the Latvian SSR” were currently taken into account in calculating pensions. The set of