GÄFGEN v. GERMANY JUDGMENT 29 Article 3 does not allow for any exceptions or justifying factors or balancing of interests, irrespective of the conduct of the person concerned and the nature of the offence at issue. 108. Having regard to the relevant factors for characterising the treatment to which the applicant was subjected, the Court is satisfied that the real and immediate threats against the applicant for the purpose of extracting information from him attained the minimum level of severity to bring the impugned conduct within the scope of Article 3. It reiterates that according to its own case-law (see paragraph 91 above), which also refers to the definition of torture in Article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture (see paragraphs 64 and 90 above), and according to the views taken by other international human rights monitoring bodies (see paragraphs 66-68 above), to which the Redress Trust likewise referred, a threat of torture can amount to torture, as the nature of torture covers both physical pain and mental suffering. In particular, the fear of physical torture may itself constitute mental torture. However, there appears to be broad agreement, and the Court likewise considers, that the classification of whether a given threat of physical torture amounted to psychological torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment depends upon all the circumstances of a given case, including, notably, the severity of the pressure exerted and the intensity of the mental suffering caused. Contrasting the applicant’s case to those in which torture has been found to be established in its case-law, the Court considers that the method of interrogation to which he was subjected in the circumstances of this case was sufficiently serious to amount to inhuman treatment prohibited by Article 3, but that it did not reach the level of cruelty required to attain the threshold of torture. 2. Whether the applicant lost his victim status (a) The Chamber judgment 109. The Chamber considered that the applicant could no longer claim to be the victim of a violation of Article 3. It found that the domestic courts had expressly acknowledged, both in the criminal proceedings against the applicant and in the criminal proceedings against police officers D. and E., that the applicant’s treatment during his interrogation by E. had violated Article 3. Moreover, the applicant had been afforded sufficient redress for this breach at national level. The two police officers involved in threatening him had been convicted and punished and had suffered prejudice in their careers. In the circumstances of the present case, these convictions had to be considered sufficient in affording redress in a manner other than by way of monetary compensation. Furthermore, the use of the proscribed methods of investigation had resulted in sanctions in that none of the applicant’s pretrial statements had been admitted as evidence at his trial.