8 ANNEN v. GERMANY - JUDGMENT A. Admissibility 1. The parties’ submissions 33. The Government argued that the applicant, when lodging his complaint under Article 10 of the Convention, had simply referred to the statements he had made in his constitutional complaint to the Federal Constitutional Court, without submitting any further arguments under the Convention. Therefore, the application had not been sufficiently substantiated. 34. Moreover, the Government contended that the applicant had failed to lodge an appeal with the Federal Court of Justice against the Court of Appeal’s decision not to grant leave to appeal. They also pointed out that the Federal Constitutional Court had refused to admit the applicant’s complaint for adjudication for being inadmissible. Thus, he had failed to exhaust domestic remedies. 35. The applicant contested this view, outlining in particular that his submissions regarding the alleged violation had been clear and precise in themselves. 2. The Court’s assessment 36. While the Court is not persuaded that a mere reference to the submissions before a domestic supreme jurisdiction represents sufficient substantiation of a complaint under the Convention, it notes that the applicant indicated the factual basis of the complaint as well as the nature of the alleged violation of the Convention. The Court is therefore satisfied that the applicant fulfilled the requirements to introduce a sufficiently substantiated complaint (compare, mutatis mutandis, Allan v. the United Kingdom (dec.), no. 48539/99, 28 August 2001 and Božinovski v. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (dec.), no. 68368/01, 1 February 2005). 37. With regard to the applicant’s failure to lodge an appeal on points of law with the Federal Court of Justice, the Court notes that this appeal is one of the remedies which should, in principle, be exhausted in order to comply with Article 35 § 1 of the Convention. However, in the present case, by decision of 12 February 2008, the five judges of the Federal Court of Justice who were also competent to adjudicate the applicant’s case, refused to grant the applicant legal aid to lodge an appeal against the Court of Appeal’s decision not to grant leave to appeal, arguing that his appeal had no reasonable prospects of success. The Court notes that appeals to the Federal Court of Justice, before which the applicant is obliged to be represented by a lawyer specially admitted to that court, can succeed only on points of law. In the light of the reasons given by the Federal Court of Justice for refusing to grant the applicant legal aid, it considers that the applicant cannot be blamed for having failed to exhaust domestic remedies by not continuing with the