PART 2: How to Bring a Case to the Court Submissions of fact need to take into account the standards developed in the Court’s jurisprudence as to the ‘elements’ of breaches of Article 3 with respect to the terms ‘torture”, ‘inhuman’, ‘degrading’ as well as ‘treatment’ and ‘punishment’. For instance, whether an act or omission of a State agent will be qualified as ‘degrading’524 depends on whether “its object 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.”525 Even if “the absence of any such purpose cannot conclusively rule out a finding of a violation of Article 3”,526 applicants who allege such a breach would be well-advised to adduce any evidence that could provide a solid basis for not only the acts themselves, but also their motivations and effects.527 c) The Severity of Ill-treatment The threshold-question of whether treatment is sufficiently severe to bring it within the reach of Article 3 is one of the areas that is under constant evolution. For instance, in 2010 in Florea v. Romania,528 the Court found ill-treatment beyond the threshold of severity required by Article 3 because a prisoner had to tolerate his fellow prisoners’ smoking even in the prison infirmary and the prison hospital against his doctor’s advice. The Court justified this decision, at least in part, because the applicant suffered from chronic hepatitis and arterial hypertension. For litigants before the Court it is of the essence to link their victim’s particular circumstances with both the specific acts or omissions that lead to the complaint and the prevailing general circumstances to substantiate their claims. Substantiation of the accuracy and veracity of allegations of ill-treatment is not on its own sufficient for the Court to conclude that the complaint is “well founded” (or, if the complaint gets beyond the admissibility stage, that there has been a violation of Article 3). This is because Article 3 does not prohibit every form of ill-treatment but only ill-treatment that reaches a minimum level of severity. In its judgment in the inter-state case of Ireland v. the United Kingdom, adopted in 1978, the Court established a test to determine whether a particular form of ill-treatment violated Article 3. According to this test, 524 Yutaka Arai-Yokoi, “Grading Scale of Degradation: Identifying the Threshold of Degrading Treatment or Punishment under Article 3 ECHR”, in Netherlands Quarterly Human Rights, vol. 21, 2003, pp. 385–422; Elaine Webster, Exploring the Prohibition of Degrading Treatment within Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (PhD thesis, 2010), at: https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/4062/1/Webster2010.pdf. 525 Kalashnikov v. Russia, no. 47095/99, 15 July 2002, § 95; Raninen v. Finland, no. 20972/92, 16 December 1997, § 55. 526 Peers v. Greece, no. 28524/95, 19 April 2001, § 74. 527 On the substantiation of allegations, the establishments of the facts, and the documents an applicant should submit see section 2.1.17 b) above. 528 Florea v. Romania, no. 37186/03, 14 September 2010. 143