MATTHEWS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT 15 and in Germany (application no. 27311/95, decision of 11 September 1995, DR 82-A, p. 158)). 41. According to the case-law of the European Court of Justice, it is an inherent aspect of EC law that such law sits alongside, and indeed has precedence over, domestic law (see, for example, Costa v. ENEL, 6/64 [1964] ECR 585, and Amministrazione delle Finanze dello Stato v. Simmenthal SpA, 106/77 [1978] ECR 629). In this regard, Gibraltar is in the same position as other parts of the European Union. 42. The Court reiterates that Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 enshrines a characteristic of an effective political democracy (see the above-mentioned Mathieu-Mohin and Clerfayt judgment, p. 22, § 47, and the abovementioned United Communist Party of Turkey and Others judgment, pp. 21-22, § 45). In the present case, there has been no submission that there exist alternative means of providing for electoral representation of the population of Gibraltar in the European Parliament, and the Court finds no indication of any. 43. The Court thus considers that to accept the Government’s contention that the sphere of activities of the European Parliament falls outside the scope of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 would risk undermining one of the fundamental tools by which “effective political democracy” can be maintained. 44. It follows that no reason has been made out which could justify excluding the European Parliament from the ambit of the elections referred to in Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 on the ground that it is a supranational, rather than a purely domestic, representative organ. C. Whether the European Parliament, at the relevant time, had the characteristics of a “legislature” in Gibraltar 45. The Government contended that the European Parliament continued to lack both of the most fundamental attributes of a legislature: the power to initiate legislation and the power to adopt it. They were of the opinion that the only change to the powers and functions of the European Parliament since the Commission last considered the issue in the above-mentioned Tête decision (see paragraph 37 above) – the procedure under Article 189b of the EC Treaty – offered less than even a power of co-decision with the Council, and in any event applied only to a tiny proportion of the Community’s legislative output. 46. The applicant took as her starting-point in this respect that the European Commission of Human Rights had found that the entry into force of the Single European Act in 1986 did not furnish the European Parliament with the necessary powers and functions for it to be considered as a “legislature” (see the above-mentioned Tête decision). She contended that the Maastricht Treaty increased those powers to such an extent that the