20 BOUYID v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT Government also observed that members of the Bouyid family had lodged several other complaints against officers from their local police station, each time against the background of a confrontation with the police after they had been stopped and questioned. They concluded that, in view of the behaviour of the Bouyid family, it was conceivable that the applicants’ complaints had been intended to discredit the police officers concerned even though no blow had been inflicted. At the hearing the Government mentioned the hypothesis that the applicants had slapped themselves in order to make a case against their municipal police force, with whom they had been having difficulties for many years. In the Government’s view the tensions had been so great that such an outcome had not been unimaginable. 69. There was therefore in the present case “more than a reasonable doubt as to the establishment of the alleged facts”. 70. The Government submitted that the latter statement did not contradict the principle that when an individual was deprived of liberty or dealing with law-enforcement officials, any recourse to physical force that was not made necessary by the person’s own conduct diminished human dignity and would in principle constitute a violation of Article 3. 71. The Government also submitted that the applicants had had access to an effective official investigation which had analysed all the available data in terms of reports, records and testimony. They added, however, that the investigation had not established that the facts alleged by the applicants had actually occurred and had accordingly been unable to identify one or more possible perpetrators. 72. Lastly, the Government stated that they could not accept that the present case should serve as a standard in the fight against police violence, since the facts were not reasonably established. B. The third-party interveners’ observations 1. Human Rights Centre of the University of Ghent 73. This third-party intervener noted that, in concluding that the severity threshold of Article 3 had not been reached, the Chamber had taken account of the applicants’ allegedly disrespectful or provocative conduct, the tense climate which had prevailed between the members of the applicants’ family and their local police officers, and the facts that the slaps had not been intended to extract confessions and that they had been isolated acts without any serious or long-term effects. It considered that in the light of the Court’s case-law, the first three of these four factors were irrelevant. Although it deemed the fourth factor valid, it submitted that there was one criterion to which cardinal importance must be attached in determining whether the severity threshold had been reached in relation to an act committed against a person deprived of his liberty by the police, namely the fact of the police