Out of the spotlight: The rights of foreigners and minorities are still a grey area (police officers and military carrying out border duties), perpetrated against migrants. Cases of ill-treatment of Greek citizens were also received but were relatively few in number and have been addressed elsewhere. According to the report submitted by Greece to the UN Committee against Torture in February 2004,85 in the period between 1996 and 2000, 163 complaints of ill-treatment were made, out of which 24 (15 per cent) resulted in the imposition of disciplinary sanctions following an internal administrative investigation. In a report published in July 2004, dealing with the internal administrative investigation of complaints against police officers, the Ombudsman listed 164 cases of complaints lodged with the Ombudsman between 2000 and 2004, 25 of which concerned ill-treatment. Of these cases, 17 (68 per cent) were dismissed after internal investigations concluded that there were no indications of misconduct. Of the rest, three cases were still being investigated while disciplinary sanctions had been imposed in five cases (20 per cent), although in one of these the accused were eventually acquitted on review. 86 The report noted that many of the complaints of illtreatment referred to the police authorities had been rejected by them as unfounded, although the authenticity of the complaints was supported by their credibility and narrative coherence, and above all by documents and other convincing forms of proof, such as medical certificates from state hospitals, confirming recent injuries, issued shortly after the complainants’ release from police stations. 44 in the lack of rigour exhibited by investigating police authorities in some of the internal investigations it examined. The report also noted that “not infrequently the conduct of some of the members of the Greek Police goes beyond mere lack of professionalism and clearly enters the domain of activities that are not merely irregular but squarely illegal … e.g. involvement of police officers in ‘protection’ networks, issuing of fake documents, trafficking of foreign women … [as well as] the largely unknown number of incidents of illegal conduct which take place in the course of the daily contact of police officers with citizens – and in violation of the rights of the latter – through various police actions, especially in the form of unjustified resort to measures of physical constraint.” In light of the information presented in this chapter, Amnesty International remains concerned about the authorities’ failure to effectively address human rights violations perpetrated by police officers, by instituting prompt, effective and impartial investigations into allegations of such violations and bringing perpetrators to justice. Among other problems, the report noted a lack of trust by the citizens in the willingness of police authorities to investigate complaints against police officers, which it found justified 85 Convention against Torture/C/61/Add.1 ) –, , * $$ ( . ( [Disciplinary – Administrative Inquiry of Complaints Against Police Personnel] Report by Andreas Takis et al, Ombudsman’s Office, July 2004. 86 Amnesty International 5 October 2005 AI Index: EUR 25/016/2005