witnesses, three of them being police staff members, and gave no credit to medical reports establishing the applicant’s injuries. Secondly, no weight was given to the fact that the Head of the Greek police himself had found against and sanctioned the two policemen involved in the applicant’s ill-treatment, or to the opposite first instance judgment that the appeal court overturned. In view of the above, the Court concluded that the Greek government did not prove that the applicant’s injuries were caused otherwise than by the ill-treatment he suffered while under police control. The second line of the Court’s reasoning concerned the level of severity that an instance of illtreatment should reach in order to fall under the scope of application of Article 3 ECHR. The Court reiterated its standard case law under which this assessment is relative and depends on the cases circumstances, such as the duration of the treatment, its physical and/or mental effects, the victim’s sex, age and state of health. As regards in particular the assessment whether a treatment is “degrading” under Article 3 ECHR, the Court examines whether the purpose is “to humiliate and debase the person concerned and whether, as far as the consequences are concerned, it adversely affected his or her personality in a manner incompatible with Article 3”. Unlike the domestic appeal court, the Strasbourg Court reached the conclusion that the applicant’s treatment by the police constituted inhuman and degrading treatment and a violation of Article 3 ECHR. It based this finding on the physical harm that the applicant had suffered by the police officers and the feelings of fear, anguish and inferiority which were produced by this ill-treatment. 3. Zontul c. Grèce, judgment of 17 January 2012 The case concerns a Turkish asylum seeker who, while in detention on Crete in 2001, was forced by two coastguard officers to undress and then one of them raped the applicant with a truncheon. Following the initiation of disciplinary proceedings the rapist coast guard officer was sanctioned by 30 days’ confinement. This decision was preceded by a coast guard report that was based on the coast guard officer’s statement according to which he had “struck lightly the [applicant] on the buttocks with his truncheon but he did not report the incident, which he regarded as insignificant”. Criminal proceedings that were initiated in 2001 were ended in 2006 with a judgment of the Naval Appeals Tribunal according to which the rapist coast guard officer had inflicted bodily injury and impaired the health of a person under his authority, had engaged in unlawful physical violence against that person and had seriously undermined his sexual dignity with the aim of punishing him (Article 137A §3 of the Greek criminal code). The sentence imposed was a suspended term of six months’ imprisonment, which was commuted to a fine of €4.40 per day of detention. The other coast guard officer who admitted aiding and abetting the offence, was sentenced to a suspended term of five months’ imprisonment, also commuted to a fine of €4.40 per day of detention. As noted also by the Greek Ombudsman (see section IV.3), migrants’ ill-treatment by coast guard officers has not been uncommon in Greece. This is linked to the fact that the latter are often on the front line receiving irregular migrants when arriving by sea.9 What is also noteworthy is the particular gravity of some of the reported cases involving coast guard officers. Apart from Zontul, another widely publicised, due to its cruelty, case is the ‘Chios submarino’ case. It concerns the interrogation and alleged submission by two coast guard officers of a Moroccan migrant to, inter alia, torture by mock execution and ‘wet and dry submarino’ (simulation of drowning and suffocation), upon the latter’s arrival, aboard a navy vessel near Chios island in 2007.10 9 In 2016 a total of 173,450 migrants arrived by sea in Greece which is 80% lower than in the same period in 2015 (856,723) see UNHCR, Refugees & Migrants Sea Arrivals in Europe, monthly data update, December 2016 at 4, available at: http://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean?id=2388. 10 The facts of this case are described in the report by Pro Asyl, The Truth may be bitter, but it must be told, October 2007, pp. 10-11, available at: https://www.proasyl.de/wpcontent/uploads/2015/12/Griechenlandbericht_The_Truth_may_be_bitter_2007_Engl.pdf. 4