receive a specified regular payment during retirement but only the amount in the account.” 17. It follows from the above that pension is a benefit that vests on an employee from an employer under a defined plan based either on length of years of service or a contribution by the employee which becomes payable after retirement. In the instant case, the monthly contributions by the Applicants as claimed can therefore be classified as pension. The next question to ask is whether pension is classified as property. Many judicial pronouncements abound where various international courts have held that pension is property. 18. In the case of Azinas v. Cyprus, JUDGMENT STRASBOURG 20 June 2002, the Applicant was a former senior public official who had been stripped of pension rights following a criminal conviction. He argued that the contributions he had paid during his 20 years of service and his employers’ undertaking to finance a pension, together with his benefits and pension amount, constituted possessions for the purposes of Article 1 of Protocol no. 1. The Court noted that: “The Applicant when entering the public service in Cyprus, had acquired a right which constituted a possession within the meaning of Article 1 of Protocol no. 1.” In the case of Wessels-Bergervoet v. the Netherlands (Application no. 34462/97) JUDGMENT STRASBOURG 4 June, 2002, the European Court of human rights confirmed that: “The Applicant’s rights to a pension under the General Old Age Pensions Act could be regarded as a ‘possession’ within the meaning of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1”. 19. Similarly, in FIVE PENSIONERS V. PERU Judgment of February 28, 2003 Series C NO. 98, The Applicants in this case were state employees and had retired after working for at least 20 years. After their retirement, a Peruvian state institution suspended payment of the Applicants and reduced 78% of the pension amount without any prior notice or explanation. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights In its Judgment of 28 February 2003, held that: “By arbitrarily modifying the victims' pensions and by not executing the judgments of the Constitutional and Social Law Chamber of the Peruvian Supreme Court of Justice until almost eight years after they had been 9