36 JALLOH v. GERMANY JUDGMENT CONCURRING OPINION OF JUDGE BRATZA I have voted with the majority of the Court on all aspects of the case but have reservations about certain parts of the reasoning in the judgment in respect of both Article 3 and Article 6 of the Convention. Article 3 My principal reservation with regard to the reasoning on Article 3 relates to paragraph 77 of the judgment in which, in reaching the conclusion that the treatment to which the applicant was subjected was inhuman and degrading, the majority place particular emphasis on the fact that the forcible medical intervention was not “necessary” to obtain the evidence that the applicant had been dealing in drugs. It is said that, because the applicant was only a street dealer and had, at the time of his arrest, clearly not been dealing in drugs on a large scale, the forcible administration of emetics was not indispensable to obtain the evidence against him and the prosecuting authorities could simply have waited for the drugs to have passed through the applicant’s system naturally in accordance with the practice in many other member States of the Council of Europe. I readily accept that States are confronted with particularly acute problems in combating the scourge of drug trafficking, notably in obtaining admissible evidence to secure convictions of major drug dealers. I can accept, too, that if a medical “necessity” is convincingly shown to exist for forcibly administering emetics rather than waiting for nature to take its course, this would, according to the constant jurisprudence of the Court, constitute a very relevant factor in determining whether the treatment to which an applicant was subjected contravened Article 3 of the Convention (see paragraph 69 of the judgment). What I cannot, however, accept is the implication in paragraph 77 that, even where no medical necessity can be shown to exist, the gravity of the suspected offence and the urgent need to obtain evidence of the offence, should be regarded as relevant factors in determining whether a particular form of treatment violates Article 3. The Court has repeatedly emphasised the special character of the guarantees under Article 3, which prohibits in absolute terms the use of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, irrespective of the nature of the victim’s conduct and which does not allow for the balancing of competing public interests against the use of treatment which attains the Article 3 threshold. Just as the urgent need to obtain evidence of a serious offence would not therefore justify resort to treatment which would otherwise attain that threshold, so also I consider that the threshold cannot