CONCURRING OPINION OF JUDGE SILVIS

I agree fully with the operative part of this judgment, but I wish to make a remark on the reasoning of the majority in regard to the applicant ’ s complaint of confinement in a cage during trial. The judgment closely follows the reasoning in Svinarenko and Slyadnev ([GC], nos. 32541/08 and 43441/08, §§ 53-76, ECHR 2014 (extracts)). In that case the Court established that the applicants must have suffered intensely while being caged in a courtroom. The Court thus found a violation of Article 3 of the Convention, applying the threshold of severity test. However, the Court also stated the view that holding a person in a metal cage during a trial constitutes in itself – having regard to its objectively degrading nature, which is incompatible with the standards of civilised behaviour that are the hallmark of a democratic society – an affront to human dignity in breach of Article 3. In the case of Bouyid v. Belgium ([GC], no. 23380/09, 29 September 2015) the Grand Chamber elaborated on the relationship between human dignity and degrading treatment and concluded that it was not necessary to establish a minimum level of suffering. Thereby the Court departed from the threshold of severity test. The case concerned police-officers slapping arrested persons in the face as a reaction to their disrespectful behaviour. The slap administered to each of the applicants by the police officers while they were under their control in the police station did not correspond to a recourse to physical force that had been made strictly necessary by their conduct, and had thus diminished their dignity. Applying that logic to the use of metal cages in courtrooms could have liberated the reasoning of the Court from the rather speculative effect of intense suffering of the applicant. Putting a person on trial in a metal cage without any necessity is degrading in its denial of human dignity. It is a pity that the Court did not depart from the threshold of severity test in the present case and that it even chose not to refer at all to the Bouyid v. Belgium case.