51. Taken together, the possibility of establishing limitations and/or conditions to the exercise of rights and the principle of equality, national legislation introducing limitations or creating different situations should satisfy the implicit criteria inspiring that principle: reasonableness, justifiability and non arbitrariness. On this line, in a case concerning Northern Ireland, the European Commission on Human Rights held that the application of a particular electoral system to a part of the country is not contrary to Article 3 if sustained by objective and reasonable justification and the means proposed are not disproportionate.[26] More specifically, when elections for the European Parliament were introduced, the Single Transferable Vote system of Proportional Representation was adopted for Northern Ireland so as to ensure that the minority would not be totally deprived of representation. When this differentiation from the rest of the United Kingdom was contested (where a different form of proportional representation is now used), the application to the European Commission of Human Rights was dismissed as inadmissible.
