5.  The applicants, Mr Goran Paunović (“the first applicant”) and Ms Ksenija Milivojević (“the second applicant”), are Serbian nationals who were born in 1965 and 1975 and currently live in Novi Sad and Belgrade, respectively.
6.  The facts of the case, as submitted by the parties, may be summarised as follows.
7.  Parliamentary elections in Serbia are held on the basis of a proportional representation system in which candidates for Parliament are included on lists put forward by political parties or coalitions. Voters choose between these lists, without voting directly for individual candidates.
8.  In 2003 the applicants were elected as members of parliament (MPs) for a political party called G17PLUS.
9.  Before the elections, however, all candidates, including the applicants, had been required by their party to sign undated letters of resignation and hand them in to the party. The documents also authorised the party to appoint other candidates in their place if necessary.
10.  Following political differences between the applicants and their party, on 5 May 2006 the first applicant signed a separate, officially certified statement, in which he declared his prior resignation letter to be null and void. The first applicant informed G17PLUS and the President of Parliament of this statement and made it public.
11.  The second applicant also subsequently told Parliament, the party and the public that she considered her earlier resignation letter to be null and void.
12.  On 15 May 2006 the head of the G17PLUS party group in Parliament dated the applicants’ resignation letters and submitted them to the President of the Parliament.
13.  On the same day, the first applicant addressed the Parliamentary Committee on Administrative Affairs, explaining that he did not intend to resign and that he wished to keep his seat as an independent MP. He provided the committee with his certified statement of 5 May 2006. However, the committee concluded that both applicants had resigned and held that their parliamentary mandates were deemed to be terminated.
14.  On 16 May 2006 a plenary session of Parliament confirmed that decision and accepted two other candidates proposed by G17PLUS as MPs in place of the applicants.
15.  On 25 May 2006 the applicants filed two separate complaints with the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court, seeking the annulment of Parliament’s decisions to terminate their mandates and replace them with other candidates.
16.  On 29 May 2006 the complaint made to the Supreme Court was dismissed on procedural grounds. The court stated that the impugned parliamentary decisions had not been “administrative acts” and could not, as such, be subject to judicial review.
17.  On 29 May 2008 the Constitutional Court also ruled against the applicants, without considering the merits of their case. It stated that new parliamentary elections had been held in January 2007, which was why the applicants’ complaint had effectively become moot. It noted that their complaint could not have been treated as a constitutional appeal, as envisaged under the Constitution adopted in November 2006, since the parliamentary decisions at issue had been made several months before the new Constitution had been adopted (see B.4 below).