52 M.S.S. v. BELGIUM AND GREECE JUDGMENT improving. It was to escape from that situation of insecurity and of material and psychological want that he tried several times to leave Greece. 255. The Court notes in the observations of the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights and the UNHCR, as well as in the reports of non-governmental organisations (see paragraph 160 above) that the situation described by the applicant exists on a large scale and is the everyday lot of a large number of asylum-seekers with the same profile as that of the applicant. For this reason, the Court sees no reason to question the truth of the applicant’s allegations. 256. The Greek Government argue that the applicant is responsible for his situation, that the authorities acted with all due diligence and that he should have done more to improve his situation. 257. The parties disagree as to whether the applicant was issued with the information brochure for asylum-seekers. The Court fails to see the relevance of this, however, as the brochure does not state that asylumseekers can tell the police that they are homeless, nor does it contain any information about accommodation. As to the notification the applicant received informing him of the obligation to go to the Attica police headquarters to register his address (see paragraph 35 above), in the Court’s opinion its wording is ambiguous and cannot reasonably be considered as sufficient information. It concludes that the applicant was not duly informed at any time of the possibilities of accommodation that were available to him, assuming that there were any. 258. In any event, the Court does not see how the authorities could have failed to notice or to assume that the applicant was homeless in Greece. The Government themselves acknowledge that there are fewer than 1,000 places in reception centres to accommodate tens of thousands of asylum-seekers. The Court also notes that, according to the UNHCR, it is a well-known fact that at the present time an adult male asylum-seeker has virtually no chance of getting a place in a reception centre and that according to a survey carried out from February to April 2010, all the “Dublin” asylum-seekers questioned by the UNHCR were homeless. Like the applicant, a large number of them live in parks or disused buildings (see paragraphs 169, 244 and 245 above). 259. Although the Court cannot verify the accuracy of the applicant’s claim that he informed the Greek authorities of his homelessness several times prior to December 2009, the above data concerning the capacity of Greece’s reception centres considerably reduce the weight of the Government’s argument that the applicant’s inaction was the cause of his situation. In any event, given the particular state of insecurity and vulnerability in which asylum-seekers are known to live in Greece, the Court considers that the Greek authorities should not simply have waited for the applicant to take the initiative of turning to the police headquarters to provide for his essential needs.

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