CONCURRING OPINION OF JUDGE DE GAETANO , JOINED BY JUDGE ZIEMELE

1. The period of deprivation of liberty – pre-trial detention – in issue in this case is of one year, eleven months and eighteen days. How the respondent Government could, with a straight face, submit that the applicant was to be considered as having suffered no “significant disadvantage” according to Article 35 § 3 (b) is beyond my powers of comprehension.

2. What I find even more strange is that in this case the Court thought fit to devote four substantial paragraphs – §§ 56 to 59 – in order to dismiss the Government ’ s third preliminary plea on inadmissibility, suggesting in the process (see the last sentence of § 58) that a pre-trial detention in breach of Article 5 § 3 may be caught by the de minimis criterion. My concern is if this attitude were transposed generally to deprivations of liberty in breach of Article 5 § 1. It is difficult for me to conceive of a situation where a deprivation of liberty in breach of Article 5 § 1 can ever be regarded as a non-significant violation. At most a given situation may amount to a mere temporary restriction of one ’ s liberty, as was implicit in Austin and Others v. the United Kingdom ([GC] nos. 39692/09, 40713/09 and 41008/09, 15 March 2012). In Ostendorf v. Germany (no. 15598/08, 7 March 2013) – where a person was detained for four hours – it never crossed anyone ’ s mind even to suggest that this was a de minimis case (even though the “no significant disadvantage” admissibility criterion was applicable in virtue of the transitory provisions of Protocol No. 14). But then perhaps the Court ’ s imagination in that case, like my imagination, is not fertile enough!

3. It would be a sad day indeed for fundamental human rights if, in order to reduce its backlog, the Court were to begin applying Article 35 § 3 (b) to Article 5 § 1 situations, instead of confining the said ground of inadmissibility to violations with a financial or patrimonial impact considered to be trivial (as, for example, in Korolev v. Russia (dec.) , no. 25551/05, 1 July 2010; and Cecchetti v. San Marino (dec.) , no. 40174/08, 9 April 2013). Were that to happen, cases like those of sexagenarian Mrs Sofiika Vasileva, who was illegally detained overnight in a police cell for failing to reveal her identity to a bus ticket inspector after she was caught riding the bus without a valid ticket ( Vasileva v. Denmark , no. 52792/99, 25 September 2003), would probably be declared de minimis .