52 ANDREJEVA v. LATVIA JUDGMENT – SEPARATE OPINION Sovietisation and Russification of the Baltic States by the Soviet Communist Party after their unlawful incorporation into the Soviet Union1. The Court ought to be able to draw a distinction between fundamentally different circumstances in fact and in international law. It is thus a very different setting when a person enters, let us say, France or the United Kingdom, which are in a position to decide whether to allow the person into their territory. Upon restoration of independence Latvia was faced with the issue of Soviet-era settlers, reaching numbers that came close to making Latvian citizens a minority in their own State, but Latvia had very limited choices in terms of its policies with respect to the Soviet-era immigrants. 28. It is curious that the text of the judgment does not seem to draw a distinction between the different legal entities concerned over the relevant period of time. Surely there is a difference for the purposes of law between the Latvian SSR, the USSR and the Republic of Latvia. One is left puzzled by the exact meaning of the use of terms “Latvia” in the context of the year 1954 or “Ukraine” in the context of the 1970s and 1980s (see paragraphs 10-11 of the judgment). Suggesting that the Republic of Latvia, as a subject of international law and thus a Party to the Convention, is a successor to the USSR, in terms of international law, does not make sense and goes against well-established State practice, as has been shown above. 29. Even worse, it may imply that, as far as the European Court of Human Rights is concerned, the obligation of international law not to accord recognition to unlawful entities is irrelevant (contrast Namibia (South-West Africa), Advisory Opinion, cited above, §§ 117-18). This is a departure from well-established case-law since the Court has consistently held that, for example, Turkey is responsible for the acts or omissions under the Convention taking place in the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, a comparator to the Latvian SSR. 30. Whatever rights or privileges were granted to the applicant under Soviet law, they were granted by the Soviet Union, whose effective control over the Latvian SSR until 1991 is probably not questioned. Similarly, it is not questioned that today the Russian Federation continues the rights and 1. The situation in the Latvian SSR has been described as follows: “Those members of the Latvian elite that had not fled to the West or perished in the Gulag were little trusted by the authorities. The Communist Party of Latvia was miniscule when the Soviets arrived ... These factors pushed the authorities to import Russians and Soviet-born or Soviet-educated Russified Latvians to fill the leading posts in society. ... Thus, embedded in the Leninist political system was an ethnic hierarchy, with Russians and Russified Latvians ruling over the indigenous Latvians. ... The scale of the migration flow eventually led many Latvians to conclude that Moscow was attempting to dilute the Latvian population or assimilate it altogether. ... Only 21.1 per cent of the Russians claimed knowledge of Latvian in the 1989 census. ... [T]he regime ... did politicise the language issue, often making the knowledge of Russian and willingness to speak it a sign of political loyalty.” See Nils Muižnieks, “Latvia: Origins, Evolution and Triumph” in I. Bremmer and R. Taras (eds.), Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor States, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 184-87.