Migrant ill-treatment in Greek law enforcement – Are the Strasbourg Court judgments the tip of the iceberg? Nikolaos Sitaropoulos Introduction Greece holds an unenviable record in Strasbourg case law concerning ill-treatment, being the first European state found, by a final decision of the former European Commission of Human Rights in the Greek case (1969), to have violated the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) due to numerous political detainees’ torture by the security police during the first years of the 19671974 dictatorship .1 Despite the systematic use of torture and other forms of ill-treatment by state security officers during that dark period of modern Greek history, the prosecutions and torturers’ trials that occurred after 1974 were largely the result of private litigation initiated by former political prisoners.2 Ill-treatment, including torture, has been traditionally prohibited by the country’s constitutions while the introduction of statutory legislation was provided for by Article 7§2 of the 1975 Constitution which considers such acts as affronts to human dignity.3 However, they remained unregulated by the criminal code until 1984 when Law 1500 was adopted. Arguably this legacy contributed to the imposition of relatively light sanctions on a limited number of the military junta’s torturers, and the unfortunate missing by Greece of a big opportunity to break the torture structure that had been embedded in its law enforcement system and tolerated by governments even before 1967. As a consequence, in all visits since 1993 and reports on Greece by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) numerous cases of torture and other forms of ill-treatment have been recorded (see section IV.2). In its 2015 visit report on Greece,4 CPT noted that infliction of illtreatment by law enforcement agents, particularly against foreign nationals, including for the purpose of obtaining confessions, continues to be a frequent practice. This reconfirmed the particular risks of ill-treatment that migrants run, as members of a social group that is often marginalised and particularly vulnerable to ill-treatment especially when in detention.5 The 2015 CPT visit report clearly identified a Greek police culture under which it is not considered unprofessional to resort to ill-treatment, although its prohibition is enshrined in the unqualified and non-derogable Article 3 (prohibition of torture) ECHR and in the non-revisable Article 7§2 of the Greek Constitution. As the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’ or ‘the Strasbourg Court’) has underlined on numerous occasions,6 Article 3 ECHR enshrines one of the most fundamental values of democratic  Head of Division and Deputy to the Director, Office of the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. All views expressed herein are strictly personal. 1 See D. J. Harris et al., Law of the European Convention on Human Rights, 3rd edition, Oxford, OUP, 2014, p. 238. 2 See Amnesty International, Torture in Greece – The first Torturers’ Trial 1975, London, 1977, pp. 58-64, available at: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/204000/eur250071977eng.pdf. 3 See Greek Constitution in English at: http://www.hellenicparliament.gr/UserFiles/f3c70a23-7696-49db9148-f24dce6a27c8/001-156%20aggliko.pdf. 4 CPT report published on 1 March 2016, available at: http://www.cpt.coe.int/documents/grc/2016-04-infeng.pdf. 5 See UN Committee against Torture, General Comment No. 2, “Implementation of article 2 by States parties”, 24 January 2008, para. 21, available at: http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/TBSearch.aspx?TreatyID=1&DocTypeID=11; see also UN Special Rapporteur on torture, report of his 2010 visit to Greece, 21 April 2011, para. 27 ff, available at: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G11/129/68/PDF/G1112968.pdf?OpenElement. 6 See, inter alia, Galotskin v. Greece, judgment of 14 January 2010, para. 32. All judgments by the Strasbourg Court are available at: www.hudoc.echr.coe.int. 1 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2921109