44. The Venice Commission has highlighted that “[t]he exercise of political power by people who seriously infringed the law puts at risk the implementation of [the] principle [of legality], which is on its turn a prerequisite of democracy, and may therefore endanger the democratic nature of the state. It is therefore justified to restrict their right to be elected”.58 It is necessary to acknowledge that, unlike ordinary party members who do not take part in the decision-making process of the party, nor in the exercise of the party’s everyday policies, and may well be unaware of the party policies in detail, the elected representatives of a political party who sit in the national legislative body are in principle at the very core of party policies and activities, although there is always a possibility that there might be MPs or other elected office-holders from that party who may have actually opposed the party’s decisions or even taken individual actions in opposition to the party’s position. It should also be noted that there may be a difference between members of parliament and members of a local council or a village, town or city mayors, who may only be remotely involved in the decision- making process of the party. It should therefore be acknowledged that not all persons affected by the law are necessarily responsible for the decisions and actions which led to the dissolution of the party. The draft law does not provide for individualised decisions and considers a whole group as collectively responsible for these violations. This leads in practice to a general, automatic and indiscriminate application of restrictive measures, thus going against the principles of proportionality and prohibition of arbitrariness guaranteed in particular by Article 3 of Protocol 1 to the ECHR and other international treaties and standards in the field of elections.