MAKARATZIS v. GREECE JUDGMENT 37 JOINT CONCURRING OPINION OF JUDGES COSTA, Sir Nicolas BRATZA, LORENZEN AND VAJIĆ While we share the view of the majority of the Court that there has been a violation of both the substantive and procedural aspects of Article 2 in the present case, we cannot fully subscribe to the Court’s reasoning as to the former. That reasoning is founded principally on two factors – the inadequacy of the general legal framework in Greece at the time of the incident regulating the use of firearms by police officers and the chaotic way in which firearms were in the event used by the police during the course of the chase and eventual wounding of the applicant. In the view of the Court, the two factors are closely linked, “the autonomy of action and unconsidered initiatives” of the police officers concerned being, in the view of the majority, an unavoidable consequence of the lack of clear guidelines and criteria governing the use of force in peacetime. We can readily agree that the way in which the operation was in fact carried out by the Athens police gave rise to a breach of the obligation to protect life within the meaning of the first sentence of Article 2. As is established by the case-law of the Court, the first sentence enjoins the State not only to refrain from the intentional and unlawful taking of life but also to take appropriate steps to safeguard the life of those within its jurisdiction. This involves a primary duty on the part of the State to secure the right to life by putting in place effective criminal-law provisions to deter the commission of offences against the person, backed up by law-enforcement machinery for the prevention, suppression and punishment of breaches of such provisions. However, it also requires in our view that recourse to potentially lethal force by agents of the State should be regulated and controlled in such a way as to minimise to the greatest extent possible the risk to human life. We accept that in the present case the authorities were faced with what appeared to be an emergency situation and one which developed with great rapidity and without any opportunity for pre-planning. We accept, too, that the obligation imposed by Article 2 should not be interpreted in such a way as to impose an impossible burden on the authorities and that the actions of those authorities should not be evaluated with the wisdom of hindsight. Nevertheless, we consider that the controls exercised by the authorities over the operation to stop and detain the applicant were manifestly inadequate. Like the majority of the Court, we are particularly struck by the number of police officers, armed with a variety of weapons, who took part in the chase without any effective centralised control over their actions or any clear chain of command. These included not only twenty-nine identified officers but an unquantified number of additional officers who participated in the chase on their own initiative and without instructions and who left the scene