ANGUELOVA v. BULGARIA JUDGMENT 39 PARTLY DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE BONELLO 1. I concurred with my colleagues in all the votes but one. I could not subscribe to the majority view that, in the present case, there has been no infringement of the prohibition against discrimination (Article 14). 2. I consider it particularly disturbing that the Court, in over fifty years of pertinacious judicial scrutiny, has not, to date, found one single instance of violation of the right to life (Article 2) or the right not to be subjected to torture or to other degrading or inhuman treatment or punishment (Article 3) induced by the race, colour or place of origin of the victim [The Commission held, in 1973, that “differential treatment of a group of persons on the basis of race might therefore be capable of constituting degrading treatment when different treatment on some other ground would raise no such question” (East African Asians v. the United Kingdom, Commission's report of 14 December 1973, Decisions and Reports 78-A)]. Leafing through the annals of the Court, an uninformed observer would be justified to conclude that, for over fifty years democratic Europe has been exempted from any suspicion of racism, intolerance or xenophobia. The Europe projected by the Court's case-law is that of an exemplary haven of ethnic fraternity, in which peoples of the most diverse origin coalesce without distress, prejudice or recrimination. The present case energises that delusion. 3. Frequently and regularly the Court acknowledges that members of vulnerable minorities are deprived of life or subjected to appalling treatment in violation of Article 3; but not once has the Court found that this happens to be linked to their ethnicity. Kurds, coloureds, Muslims, Roma and others are again and again killed, tortured or maimed, but the Court is not persuaded that their race, colour, nationality or place of origin has anything to do with it. Misfortunes punctually visit disadvantaged minority groups, but only as the result of well-disposed coincidence. 4. At the root of this injurious escape from reality lies the evidentiary rule which the Court has inflicted on itself: “The Court recalls ... that the standard of proof required under the Convention is 'proof beyond reasonable doubt'.” [Velikova v. Bulgaria, no. 41488/98, ECHR 2000-VI] The majority found that in the present case it had not been established “beyond reasonable doubt” that in the death of the 17-year-old Rom, Anguel Zabchekov that followed the devoted attentions of police officers, his ethnicity was “a determining factor” with those police officers who facilitated the young Rom's access to the fastest lane from Razgrad to eternity. 5. This inability to establish a link between physical abuse and ethnicity comes notwithstanding that the red light about the special treatment of Roma by the Bulgarian police in breach of Articles 2 and 3 has been flashing insistently and alarmingly: this is the third case of death or brutality