In the last few years, several cases raising a very similar issue have been brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR): all these disputes are centred around the identity of a certain group which the applicants claim to defend, while the State contests either the mere existence of this group as distinct from the rest of the population, or the terms used by the applicants to describe it. Two of these cases – Sidiropoulos and others v. Greece and Gorzelik and others v. Poland – bear upon the refusal of national Courts to register an association created to promote a ‘minority culture’ – the ‘Macedonian’ one in the first instance, the culture of the ‘Silesian national minority’ in the second. The Greek government argues that ‘Macedonians’ do not constitute a distinct ethnic group, and that the claiming of a separate ‘Macedonian identity’ is an attack against Greek symbols and history, if not against the territorial integrity of Greece. In the Polish case, registration was refused on the ground that the association wrongly alleged that the ‘Silesians’ constitute a ‘national minority', while, according to domestic Courts, they are ‘only’ an ‘ethnic group'. The other cases concern measures or sanctions imposed on the applicants because of the stance they took with respect to a particular community: the conviction of a Greek MP for having used the term ‘Turks’ during the electoral campaign to address the Muslim population of Western Thrace in Greece (Ahmet Sadik v. Greece); the dissolution of political parties in Turkey for having stated in their programme that ‘Kurds’ constitute a ‘minority', a ‘people’ or a ‘nation’ (Unified Communist Party of Turkey (TBKP) and others v. Turkey; Socialist Party of Turkey and others v. Turkey; Party of Freedom and Democracy (Özdep) v. Turkey); finally a prohibition on organising public meetings issued against an association promoting the alleged ‘Macedonian’ culture and history in Bulgaria (Stankov and the United Macedonian Organisation Ilinden v. Bulgaria).