ELCI AND OTHERS v. TURKEY JUDGMENT 118 the right to put claims before a competent review body, which provisions included the right of individual petition under the Convention. 707. During interrogations, no questions were put to the applicants regarding cases pending before the Commission, as is reflected in the applicants' oral evidence to the Commission Delegates. 708. If anyone were to have made a complaint under this provision, it would have had to have been the applicants' clients, not the applicants themselves. 709. The applicants Mr and Mrs Şahin and Mr Demırhan had confessed in their statements to the gendarmes of having had contacts with PKK members in other parts of Europe and that they had sent out documents with a view to disseminating propaganda against Turkey. This was taken up in the indictment and was not linked to any Convention applications. 710. The Government repeated that Mr Elçi's Commission case files were returned to him. B. The Court's assessment 711. The Court recalls that it is of the utmost importance for the effective operation of the system of individual petition instituted by former Article 25 (now replaced by Article 34) that applicants should be able to communicate freely with the Convention organs without being subjected to any form of pressure from the authorities to withdraw or modify their complaints (see the Şarli v. Turkey judgment of 22 May 2001, no. 24490/94, § 84). In this context, “pressure” includes not only direct coercion and flagrant acts of intimidation but also other improper indirect acts or contacts designed to dissuade or discourage applicants from pursuing a Convention remedy. 712. In the present case, the Court notes that considerable confusion has arisen over the references to Europe and to European human rights associations in the interrogations of and indictment against the applicants. However, the Court does not find it established that these were references to the Convention organs or applications to the Commission at the time. It accepts that they were more likely to have been references to nongovernmental organisations, whether allegedly linked to the PKK or having objective human rights aims (see, for example, the indictment as regards Sabahattin Acar, Baki Demırhan, İmam Şahin and Arzu Şahin, paragraph 535 above). 713. The Court finds that the applicants Tahir Elçi, İmam Şahin, Arzu Şahin, Sabahattin Acar and Baki Demırhan were able to lodge complete applications to the Commission and to pursue them before the Convention organs without major obstacles. 714. The Court accepts that the events to which they were subjected could have had a damaging effect on the applicants' professional activities,