ANGUELOVA v. BULGARIA JUDGMENT – PARTLY DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE BONELLO 41 impunity [European Roma Rights Centre, Country Reports Series no. 6, December 1997]. 8. Similar negative assessments of systematic police brutality against Roma in Bulgaria has been expressed and recorded by other human rights watchdogs, like the Human Rights Project, the Bulgaria Helsinki Committee and Human Rights Watch. 9. Nowhere does the Convention mandate the “proof beyond reasonable doubt” standard today required of the victim to convince the Court that death or ill-treatment were induced by ethnic prejudice. Article 32, on the contrary, gives the Court the widest possible discretion as to the interpretation and the application of the Convention. What the Convention does mandate is quite the opposite: that its provisions should be given thorough implementation. Any exercise in interpreting the Convention must be geared to “securing the universal and effective recognition and observation” of the guarantees enumerated, unless it is to turn into a betrayal of the spirit and the letter of its momentous preamble. The Convention has to be applied by the Court in such a way as to guarantee “not rights that are theoretical or illusory, but rights that are practical and effective” [Artico v. Italy, judgment of 13 May 1980, Series A no. 37]. No more effective tool could be devised to ensure that the protection against racial discrimination becomes illusory and inoperative than requiring from the victim a standard of proof that, in other civil-law disputes, is required of no one else. 10. The Court has never explained, let alone justified, why the standard of proof weighting the applicant in human rights disputes should be equivalent to that required of the State to obtain a safe and dependable criminal conviction. I have elsewhere disassociated myself from any adherence to a standard that I find legally untenable and, in practice, unachievable; a standard that only serves to ensure that human rights harm, however flaunted and forbidding, remains unharmed [Veznedaroğlu v. Turkey, no. 32357/96, 11 April 2000]. This doctrine only rewards those the Convention would fain not see rewarded. 11. It is cheerless for me to discern that, in the cornerstone protection against racial discrimination, the Court has been left lagging behind other leading human rights tribunals. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, for instance, has established standards altogether more reasonable: “The international protection of human rights should not be confused with criminal justice. States do not appear before the Court as defendants in a criminal action. The objective of international human rights law is not to punish those individuals who are guilty of violations, but rather to protect the victims and to provide for the reparation of damages resulting from the acts of States responsible” [Velásquez Rodríguez v. Honduras, InterAmerican Court of Human Rights, 29 July 1988, § 134].