MATTHEWS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT 14 European Parliament were dealt with on the merits, so that the Commission in effect assumed that Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 applied to elections to the European Parliament (see, for example, Lindsay v. the United Kingdom, application no. 8364/78, decision of 8 March 1979, Decisions and Reports (DR) 15, p. 247, and Tête v. France, application no. 11123/84, decision of 9 December 1987, DR 54, p. 52). She agreed with the dissenting members of the Commission who did not accept that because the European Parliament did not exist when Protocol No. 1 was drafted, it necessarily fell outside the ambit of Article 3 of that Protocol. 38. The majority of the Commission based its reasoning on this jurisdictional point. It considered that “to hold Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 to be applicable to supranational representative organs would be to extend the scope of Article 3 beyond what was intended by the drafters of the Convention and beyond the object and purpose of the provision. ...[T]he role of Article 3 is to ensure that elections take place at regular intervals to the national or local legislative assembly, that is, in the case of Gibraltar, to the House of Assembly” (see paragraph 63 of the Commission’s report). 39. That the Convention is a living instrument which must be interpreted in the light of present-day conditions is firmly rooted in the Court’s caselaw (see, inter alia, the Loizidou v. Turkey judgment of 23 March 1995 (preliminary objections), Series A no. 310, pp. 26-27, § 71, with further reference). The mere fact that a body was not envisaged by the drafters of the Convention cannot prevent that body from falling within the scope of the Convention. To the extent that Contracting States organise common constitutional or parliamentary structures by international treaties, the Court must take these mutually agreed structural changes into account in interpreting the Convention and its Protocols. The question remains whether an organ such as the European Parliament nevertheless falls outside the ambit of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1. 40. The Court recalls that the word “legislature” in Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 does not necessarily mean the national parliament: the word has to be interpreted in the light of the constitutional structure of the State in question. In the case of Mathieu-Mohin and Clerfayt v. Belgium, the 1980 constitutional reform had vested in the Flemish Council sufficient competence and powers to make it, alongside the French Community Council and the Walloon Regional Council, a constituent part of the Belgian “legislature”, in addition to the House of Representatives and the Senate (see the Mathieu-Mohin and Clerfayt v. Belgium judgment of 2 March 1987, Series A no. 113, p. 23, § 53; see also the Commission’s decisions on the application of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 to regional parliaments in Austria (application no. 7008/75, decision of 12 July 1976, DR 6, p. 120)