12 NIX v. GERMANY DECISION what the appellant dictates, or copies observations written by the appellant (ibid.). COMPLAINT 37. The applicant complained under Article 10 of the Convention about his criminal conviction for the offence of using the symbols of unconstitutional organisations – in this instance, the picture of Himmler in SS uniform wearing a swastika armband – in a post on his blog on 23 March 2014. THE LAW 38. The Court notes that the Federal Constitutional Court found the applicant’s constitutional complaint to be inadmissible without, however, indicating with which admissibility requirement the applicant had failed to comply (see paragraph 28 above). It observes that the inadmissibility of the constitutional complaint is not evident from the case-file (compare and contrast Colak and Others v. Germany (dec.), nos. 77144/01 and 35493/05, 11 December 2007; and Karabulut v. Germany (dec.), no. 59546/12, § 40, 21 November 2017). In particular, it is not obvious that the applicant failed to comply with a particular formal requirement for lodging his constitutional complaint, as he lodged that complaint within the one-month time-limit under domestic law after service of the Court of Appeal’s decision (see paragraphs 25 and 26 above) and the Court of Appeal had entered into an assessment of the merits of his appeal on points of law (see paragraph 25 above and Gäfgen v. Germany [GC], no. 22978/05, § 143, ECHR 2010). The Court is not in a position to establish the reason why the applicant’s constitutional complaint was considered inadmissible (see Annen v. Germany, no. 3690/10, § 39, 26 November 2015). It can, however, leave open whether the applicant exhausted domestic remedies as required by Article 35 § 1 of the Convention, because the present application is, in any event, inadmissible because it is manifestly ill-founded within the meaning of Article 35 § 3 (a) of the Convention for the reasons set out below. 39. The applicant argued that Article 86a § 1 of the Criminal Code (as interpreted by the domestic courts) requiring that a person using a symbol of an unconstitutional organisation clearly distance himself or herself from Nazi ideology in order to avoid criminal liability constituted an interference with freedom of expression that was not necessary in a democratic society. A milder but similarly effective measure would be to sanction only such use