18 MEDVEDYEV AND OTHERS v. FRANCE JUDGMENT and that the ship had been identified as the Winner before the operations commenced. 40. The Chamber nevertheless agreed that, regard being had to Article 108 of the Montego Bay Convention, the Cambodian authorities’ diplomatic note of 7 June 2002 could be considered to have provided a legal basis for the interception and boarding of the Winner by the French authorities, although this did not apply to the thirteen days’ deprivation of liberty imposed on the crew on board the ship. It further found that neither French law nor Article 17 of the Vienna Convention made any more specific provision for deprivation of liberty of the type and duration of that to which the applicants were subjected. 41. In the Chamber’s opinion, the legal provisions relied on by the Government did not afford sufficient protection against arbitrary violations of the right to liberty: firstly, none of those provisions referred specifically to depriving the crew of the intercepted ship of their liberty or regulated the conditions of deprivation of liberty on board the ship; secondly, they neglected to place the detention under the supervision of a judicial authority. On this last point the Chamber noted that although measures taken under the Law of 15 July 1994 were taken under the supervision of the public prosecutor, the public prosecutor was not a “competent legal authority” within the meaning the Court’s case-law gave to that notion (see Schiesser v. Switzerland, 4 December 1979, §§ 29-30, Series A no. 34). 42. It accordingly found that the applicants had not been deprived of their liberty “in accordance with a procedure prescribed by law”, within the meaning of Article 5 § 1. B. The parties’ submissions before the Grand Chamber 1. The applicants 43. The applicants, who shared the analysis followed by the Chamber in its judgment, considered that the action taken by the French authorities on the high seas and their detention on board the Winner had no legal basis. They submitted that there was no legal basis for the boarding of the Winner either in international conventions to which Cambodia was not a party, be it the Montego Bay Convention or the Vienna Convention, or in the diplomatic note of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of 7 June 2002. 44. They argued that Article 108 of the Montego Bay Convention was not applicable in this case because, in their submission, it was not Cambodia, the flag State, that had requested the cooperation of France, but France that had taken the initiative of requesting authorisation to stop a ship flying the Cambodian flag. The fact that Cambodia granted that request could not be likened to a request for cooperation within the meaning of Article 108 of the Montego Bay Convention. As to Article 110 of that