A. AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT 71 jurisprudence under that Article or reached a conclusion which was manifestly unreasonable. (ii) Whether there was a “public emergency threatening the life of the nation” 175. The applicants argued that there had been no public emergency threatening the life of the British nation, for three main reasons: firstly, the emergency was neither actual nor imminent; secondly, it was not of a temporary nature; and, thirdly, the practice of other States, none of which had derogated from the Convention, together with the informed views of other national and international bodies, suggested that the existence of a public emergency had not been established. 176. The Court reiterates that in Lawless (cited above, § 28), it held that in the context of Article 15 the natural and customary meaning of the words “other public emergency threatening the life of the nation” was sufficiently clear and that they referred to “an exceptional situation of crisis or emergency which affects the whole population and constitutes a threat to the organised life of the community of which the State is composed”. In the Greek case (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands v. Greece, nos. 3321/67, 3322/67, 3323/67 and 3344/67, Commission’s report of 5 November 1969, Yearbook 12, p. 70, § 113), the Commission held that, in order to justify a derogation, the emergency should be actual or imminent; that it should affect the whole nation to the extent that the continuance of the organised life of the community was threatened; and that the crisis or danger should be exceptional, in that the normal measures or restrictions, permitted by the Convention for the maintenance of public safety, health and order, were plainly inadequate. In Ireland v. the United Kingdom (cited above, §§ 205 and 212), the parties were agreed, as were the Commission and the Court, that the Article 15 test was satisfied, since terrorism had for a number of years represented “a particularly far-reaching and acute danger for the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom, the institutions of the six counties and the lives of the province’s inhabitants”. The Court reached similar conclusions as regards the continuing security situation in Northern Ireland in Brannigan and McBride (cited above) and Marshall v. the United Kingdom ((dec.), no. 41571/98, 10 July 2001). In Aksoy (cited above), it accepted that Kurdish separatist violence had given rise to a “public emergency” in Turkey. 177. Before the domestic courts, the Secretary of State adduced evidence to show the existence of a threat of serious terrorist attacks planned against the United Kingdom. Additional closed evidence was adduced before SIAC. All the national judges accepted that the danger was credible (with the exception of Lord Hoffmann, who did not consider that it was of a nature to constitute “a threat to the life of the nation” – see paragraph 18 above). Although when the derogation was made no al-Qaeda attack had taken place within the territory of the United Kingdom, the Court does not consider that