E/CN.4/2006/6 page 14 applicable and the prohibition of torture and CIDT is absolute. This absolute prohibition of the use of any form of physical force or mental coercion applies, first of all, to situations of interrogation by any public official, whether working for the police forces, the military or the intelligence services. Notes 1 Some authors, including Herman Burgers, who chaired the working group drafting CAT in the 1980s, have argued that victims of the prohibition of torture and CIDT in the sense of articles 1 and 16 “must be understood as consisting of persons who are deprived of their liberty or who are otherwise under the factual power or control of the person responsible for the treatment or punishment”: J.H. Burgers and H. Danelius, The United Nations Convention against Torture. A Handbook on the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1988), p. 149. The European Court of Human Rights, the Committee against Torture and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have not followed this approach. There are cases in which the excessive use of police force outside detention, by applying the proportionality test has been found to constitute CIDT: e.g. the cases of R.L. and M.-J.D. v. France (application No. 44568/98) concerning ill-treatment during police intervention in a dispute at a restaurant which resulted in a violation of article 3 of ECHR; see also the Ozemajl et al. case (CAT/C/29/D/161/2000), where the Committee against Torture found the demolition by a mob of a Roma settlement with the knowledge of the local police and without the police preventing its occurrence to be a violation of article 16 of CAT, and the Corumbiara case, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights No. 11556 of 11 March 2004, Report No. 32/04. 2 The principle of proportionality requires first of all the legality of the use of force under domestic law, which is usually regulated in police codes. Secondly, the use of force must aim at a lawful purpose, such as effecting the lawful arrest of a person suspected of having committed an offence, preventing the escape of a person lawfully detained, defending a person from unlawful violence, self-defence, or an action lawfully taken for the purpose of dispersing a demonstration or quelling a riot or insurrection. Most of these purposes can be found explicitly in article 2 (2) of ECHR relating to the non-absolute nature of the right to life, but no similar exceptions have been adopted in relation to the right to personal integrity and dignity in article 3 of ECHR. This was perhaps a mistake. It would have been better to define the right to personal integrity and dignity in a positive manner, to provide an absolute prohibition of any form of torture (similar to the absolute prohibition of slavery and servitude in article 4 (1) of ECHR and article 8 (1) of ICCPR as opposed to the relative prohibition of forced labour) and to establish a limitation clause for the use of lawful force by law enforcement officers. Thirdly, the type of the weapons used and the intensity of the force applied must not be excessive but necessary in the particular circumstances of the case in order to achieve any of the lawful purposes outlined above. This means that the law enforcement officers must strike a fair balance between the purpose of the measure and the interference with the right to personal integrity of the persons affected. If a thief, for example, has been observed stealing a toothbrush in a supermarket, the use of firearms for the purpose of effecting his or her arrest must be considered as