CONCURRING OPINION OF JUDGE SIR NICOLAS BRATZA

I agree with the conclusions and with the reasoning of the Chamber, save that I have the same hesitations about the passage in paragraph 65 of the judgment, which draws on paragraph 157 of the Court ’ s Nachova judgment ( Nachova and Others v. Bulgaria [GC], nos.43577/98 and 43579/98), as I expressed in the Nachova case itself.

Although it does not affect the outcome of the present case, any more than it did in the case of Nachova , I remain of the view that the paragraph is too broadly expressed when it suggests that, because of the evidential difficulties which would confront a Government, it would rarely if ever be appropriate to shift the burden to the Government to prove that a particular act in violation of the Convention (in this case, Article 3; in Nachova , Article 2) was not racially motivated. As in the Nachova case itself, I consider that circumstances could relatively eas ily be imagined in which it would be justified to require a Government to prove that the ethnic origins of a detainee had not been a material factor in the ill-treatment to which he had been subjected by agents of the State.

SEPARATE OPINION OF JUDGE CASADEVALL

(Translation)

1. I voted – albeit without great conviction – in favour of the finding that there ha d been no violation of Article 14 taken in conjunction with Article 3 of the Convention in respect of the applicants ’ allegation that the treatment inflicted on the m by the police was racially motivated (point 4 of the operative provisions). My vote was prompted by the need for solidarity and cohesion after the Grand Chamber ’ s recent decision in the case of Na chova v. Bulgaria , which raised an almost identical question to that of the present case, namely the existence of racial motives in the conduct of members of the security forces. I thus maintain the view that I expressed with some of my colleagues in our joint dissenting opinion annexed to the Nachova judgment.

2. Since the Court, in the present case also, found that there had been a twofold violation of Article 3, under substantive and procedural heads, it would have been sufficient, in my opinion, if the Court had also found a violation of Article 14 by adopting a holistic approach to the complaint, instead of minimising the problem by simply attaching it to the procedural aspects of Article 3.

3. The serious, precise and corroborative presumptions which emerge from the case file as a whole, together with the “ plausible information available to the authorities that the alleged assaults had been racially motivated ... ” (paragraph 74 of the judgment) and the joint open letter of 11 May 1998 from the Greek Helsinki Monitor and the Greek Minority Rights Group to the Ministry of Public Order (paragraph 17 of the judgment), confirm the conclusion that there was a violation of Article 14 taken in conjunction with Article 3 of the Convention, without any need to distinguish between substantive and procedural aspects.