M.S.S. v. BELGIUM AND GREECE JUDGMENT – SEPARATE OPINIONS 105 defective. In particular, the minimum standards are (a) insufficient and (b) vague, thus lacking the potential to ensure fair and efficient examinations, and additional measures are to be taken to grant applicants a realistic opportunity to substantiate their requests for international protection. This is the gist of the present problem. Asylum-seekers are generally at least somewhat vulnerable because of their past experiences and the fact that they live in a new and different environment; more importantly, the uncertainty about their future can make them vulnerable. Waiting and hoping endlessly for a final official decision on a fundamental existential issue in legal uncertainty caused by official neglect arouses feelings of fear, anguish or inferiority capable of breaking an individual’s moral and physical resistance, and therefore it may be characterised as degrading. The well-documented insufficiencies of the Greek asylum system (including the extremely low likelihood of success in the applications – 1% in Greece against more than 60% in Malta) turn such a system into a degrading one. An asylum system with a rate of recognition not exceeding 1% is suspect per se in terms of the fairness of the procedure; the Greek Government failed to provide any justification for this apparent statistical aberration. The authorities should handle the applications in a timely and fair manner; when interviews are granted on Saturdays only (paragraph 105 of the judgment), and when even access to the Attica police headquarters is difficult, State passivity becomes pervasive. This mismanagement was never explained by the Government. Such passivity precludes a timely and fair procedure; in the absence of such a procedure, existential angst will become common. I find it decisive that asylum-seekers are negatively affected by the lack of timely evaluation of their asylum applications (a matter clearly to be attributed to the State) in a process where their claim is not evaluated fairly. “Asylum-seekers who remain in the asylum procedure for more than two years have a significantly higher risk of psychiatric disorders, compared to those who just arrived in the country. This risk is higher than the risk of adverse life events in the country of origin.1” Given the high likelihood of a medical condition resulting from the passivity of the State in a procedure that is decisive for the fate of people living in dependency, there is an Article 3 responsibility of the State in situations like the present one. Had he been a victim under Article 34, the applicant’s rights could have been found to have been violated. 1. Laban, C.J., Dutch Study of Iraqi Asylum Seekers: Impact of a Long Asylum Procedure on Health and Health Related Dimensions among Iraqi Asylum Seekers in the Netherlands; An Epidemiological Study, doctoral dissertation, 2010, p. 151, see: http://dspace.ubvu.vu.nl/bitstream/1871/15947/2/part.pdf (comparing Iraqi asylum-seekers whose asylum procedure has taken at least two years with Iraqi asylum-seekers who had just arrived in the Netherlands, with additional literature).