114 M.S.S. v. BELGIUM AND GREECE JUDGMENT – SEPARATE OPINIONS application of the Dublin system in Greece, the deficiencies of the asylum procedure in that country and the practice of direct or indirect refoulement on an individual or collective basis. These reports, it is said, have been published at regular intervals since 2006 “and with greater frequency in 2008 and 2009, and ... most of them had already been published when the expulsion order against the applicant was issued” (paragraph 348 of the judgment). In this regard, “critical importance” is attached in the judgment to the letter of 2 April 2009 addressed to the Belgian Minister for Migration and Asylum Policy which contained “an unequivocal plea for the suspension of transfers to Greece” (paragraph 349 of the judgment). Reliance is also placed on the fact that, since December 2008, the European asylum system has itself entered a “reform phase” aimed at strengthening the protection of asylum-seekers and implementing a temporary suspension of transfers under the Dublin Regulation to avoid asylum-seekers being sent back to member States unable to offer them a sufficient level of protection of their fundamental rights. 8. I am unpersuaded that any of the developments relied on in the judgment should have led the Belgian authorities in June 2009 to treat the decision as no longer authoritative or to conclude that the return of the applicant would violate Article 3. As to the reports and other materials dating back to the years 2006, 2007 and 2008, while the material may be regarded as adding to the detail or weight of the information which had already been taken into account by the Court, it did not in my view change the substantive content of that information or otherwise affect the Court’s reasoning in the K.R.S. v. the United Kingdom decision. Moreover, I have difficulty in seeing how it can be held against the Belgian authorities that they failed to take account of material which was already in the public domain at the time of the K.R.S. v. the United Kingdom decision itself. 9. I have similar difficulty in seeing how, in June 2009, the presumption of Greek compliance which the Court had found to exist in December 2008 could be rebutted by the numerous reports and other information which became available in the second half of 2009 and in 2010. The graphic detail in those reports and in the powerful submissions to the Court by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights and the UNHCR as to the living conditions for asylum-seekers in Greece, the grave deficiencies in the system of processing asylum applications in that country and the risk of onward return to Afghanistan unquestionably provide a solid basis today on which to treat the presumption of compliance as rebutted. But this material post-dates the decision of the Belgian authorities to return the applicant and cannot in my view be prayed in aid as casting doubt on the validity of the K.R.S. v. the United Kingdom decision at that time. 10. The same I consider applies to the majority’s reliance on the proposal to modify the Dublin system by providing for a mechanism to suspend transfers, which proposal had not been adopted by the European