36 BOSPHORUS HAVA YOLLARI TURİZM VE TİCARET ANONİM ŞİRKETİ v. IRELAND JUDGMENT C. The third-party submissions 1. The European Commission (“the Commission”) (a) Article 1 of the Convention 122. The Commission considered that the application concerned in substance a State's responsibility for Community acts: while a State retained some Convention responsibility after it had ceded powers to an international organisation, that responsibility was fulfilled where there was proper provision in that organisation's structure for effective protection of fundamental rights at a level at least “equivalent” to that of the Convention. The Commission therefore supported the approach adopted in M. & Co. (cited above) and urged the Court to adopt this solution pending accession to the Convention by the European Union. Thereafter, any Convention responsibility, over and above the need to establish equivalent protection, would only arise when the State exercised a discretion accorded to it by the international organisations. 123. The Commission considered this approach to be consistent with the recent case-law of this Court. The reference in Matthews (cited above) to a State's Convention responsibility continuing after a transfer of competence to the European Community and to the Convention responsibility of the United Kingdom was consistent with the M. & Co. approach, given the differing impugned measures in issue in both cases. Waite and Kennedy and Beer and Regan (both cited above) fully confirmed the Commission's position. Cantoni was clearly distinguishable, as this Court had reviewed the discretion exercised by the French authorities to create criminal sanctions in implementing a Community directive. 124. The reason for initially adopting this “equivalent protection” approach (facilitating State cooperation through international organisations) was equally, if not more, pertinent today. It was an approach which was especially important for the European Community given its distinctive features of supranationality and the nature of Community law: to require a State to review for Convention compliance an act of the European Community before implementing it (with the unilateral action and nonobservance of Community law that would potentially entail) would pose an incalculable threat to the very foundations of the Community, a result not envisaged by the drafters of the Convention, supportive as they were of European cooperation and integration. Moreover, subjecting individual Community acts to Convention scrutiny would amount to making it a respondent in Convention proceedings without any of the procedural rights and safeguards of a Contracting State to the Convention. In short, the M. &