MATTHEWS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT 13 practical and effective (see, for example, the above-mentioned United Communist Party of Turkey and Others judgment, pp. 18-19, § 33). It is uncontested that legislation emanating from the legislative process of the European Community affects the population of Gibraltar in the same way as legislation which enters the domestic legal order exclusively via the House of Assembly. To this extent, there is no difference between European and domestic legislation, and no reason why the United Kingdom should not be required to “secure” the rights in Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 in respect of European legislation, in the same way as those rights are required to be “secured” in respect of purely domestic legislation. In particular, the suggestion that the United Kingdom may not have effective control over the state of affairs complained of cannot affect the position, as the United Kingdom’s responsibility derives from its having entered into treaty commitments subsequent to the applicability of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 to Gibraltar, namely the Maastricht Treaty taken together with its obligations under the Council Decision and the 1976 Act. Further, the Court notes that on acceding to the EC Treaty, the United Kingdom chose, by virtue of Article 227(4) of the Treaty, to have substantial areas of EC legislation applied to Gibraltar (see paragraphs 11 to 14 above). 35. It follows that the United Kingdom is responsible under Article 1 of the Convention for securing the rights guaranteed by Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 in Gibraltar regardless of whether the elections were purely domestic or European. B. Whether Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 is applicable to an organ such as the European Parliament 36. The Government claimed that the undertaking in Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 was necessarily limited to matters falling within the power of the parties to the Convention, that is, sovereign States. They submitted that the “legislature” in Gibraltar was the House of Assembly, and that it was to that body that Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 applied in the context of Gibraltar. For the Government, there was no basis upon which the Convention could place obligations on Contracting Parties in relation to elections for the parliament of a distinct, supranational organisation, and they contended that this was particularly so when the member States of the European Community had limited their own sovereignty in respect of it and when both the European Parliament itself and its basic electoral procedures were provided for under its own legal system, rather than the legal systems of its member States. 37. The applicant referred to previous decisions of the European Commission of Human Rights in which complaints concerning the