As of early 2017 the Strasbourg Court has delivered two major judgments against Greece finding violations of Article 3 ECHR, due to ill-treatment of migrants by law enforcement agents, which are analysed below. 1. Alsayed Allaham v. Greece, judgment of 18 January 2007 The facts of the case date back to 1998 when the Syrian applicant, legal resident in Greece, was severely beaten by a police officer in a police station in Athens where he had gone to report a robbery. As a consequence, the applicant’s eardrum was perforated and he suffered from hearing loss in both ears and vertigo while his working capacity diminished by 80%. Following the applicant’s complaint and police disciplinary proceedings the Head of the Greek police fined the aforementioned policeman, as well as another one who acted as his accomplice, to 100,000 drachmas (293 euros) and to 50,000 drachmas (147 euros) respectively. Following criminal proceedings, initiated again by the applicant, in 2002 the three-member Athens Court of Appeal, sitting as a first instance court, found the policeman who ill-treated the applicant guilty of serious bodily harm and sentenced him to four months’ imprisonment. Following an appeal the same year, the five-member Athens Court of Appeal overturned the first instance judgment and acquitted the defendant. It found that it had not been established that the defendant had beaten the applicant, taking into account statements made by the defendant’s colleague and accomplice, the chief of the police station and three other eye-witnesses one of whom was another policeman. A subsequent request for appeal to the Court of Cassation, which was filed by the applicant with the Public Prosecutor, was dismissed. In addition, an action for damages filed by the applicant was rejected in 2004 by the Athens Administrative Court. The Strasbourg Court’s finding of a violation by Greece of Article 3 ECHR was based on two major lines of reasoning. The first one concerned the examination and verification of the applicant’s illtreatment at the hands of the police. Having noted that Article 3 enshrines one of the most fundamental values of democratic societies, prohibiting “in absolute terms torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, irrespective of the victim’s conduct”, the Court proceeded to reiterating some fundamental evidentiary rules applied by it in such cases: First, in assessing evidence, the standard of proof is “beyond reasonable doubt”. Secondly, such proof may be based on “the coexistence of sufficiently strong, clear and concordant inferences or of similar unrebutted presumptions of fact”. Thirdly, in cases where the events in issue lie, wholly or partly, within the authorities’ exclusive knowledge, as is the case of persons in custody or in the authorities’ control, “strong presumptions of fact will arise in respect of injuries occurring during such detention”. The Court underlined that in such cases the burden of proof may rest on the authorities “to provide a satisfactory and convincing explanation”. Thus when one is injured while in detention or under the control of the police, “any such injury will give rise to a strong presumption that the person was subjected to ill-treatment”. The Strasbourg Court went on and clarified the state’s obligation of factual verification in this context: the authorities are bound to make a serious attempt to find out what happened. A possible acquittal of the police officers by a criminal court does not automatically discharge the respondent state from the onus, under Article 3 ECHR, of proving that the alleged ill-treatment did not originate in acts of police officers. 2. Major shortcomings of judicial proceedings highlighted in Alsayed Allaham This judgment is important primarily because it highlighted the above factual verification obligation that is borne not only by the administration but also the courts that may be involved in these cases. Thus in Alsayed Allaham, the Strasbourg Court identified two major flaws in the acquittal judgment of the appeal court: First, the appeal court based itself essentially on testimonies of five eye3 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2921109