Among the CoE member states, legal quotas have been rather unpopular until recently. Especially in Central and Eastern Europe there is particular resistance to quota provisions, due to the Soviet past, when quotas were used as a rather symbolic form of “emancipation from above”. In countries like the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland, proposals to introduce legal quotas were finally rejected by the political parties (although some of them apply voluntary quotas). The same has happened in several Western European democracies, e.g. in Switzerland. In a few states, legal quotas were brought before the Constitutional Courts. In Italy, for instance, the Constitutional Court repealed the respective law in 1995, contrary to Spain, where the Equality Law was declared constitutional in 2008. The sentence of the Spanish Constitutional Court states that balanced presence or membership as it is established in the Organic Act for effective equality between women and men, does not refer to legal gender quota or affirmative action.