38 MAKARATZIS v. GREECE JUDGMENT – JOINT CONCURRING OPINION OF JUDGES COSTA, Sir Nicolas BRATZA, LORENZEN AND VAJIĆ without identifying themselves and without handing in their weapons. Moreover, it is apparent that at least one of these unidentified officers opened fire on the car, the Athens First-Instance Criminal Court finding that a bullet recovered from the body of the applicant and a bullet found inside the car were unrelated to any of the thirty-three weapons which had been surrendered for examination following the incident. In our view, the undisciplined and uncontrolled manner in which the operation was conducted, which carried with it a serious risk of fatal injury to the applicant, is in itself sufficient to give rise to the finding of a breach of the obligation to protect life under Article 2. Where we part company with the majority is as to their further reliance on the claimed inadequacy of the legislative framework in Greece at the relevant time, governing the use of firearms. The majority emphasise that the applicable legislation, which dated from the occupation of Greece in the Second World War, listed a wide range of situations in which a police officer could use firearms without being liable for the consequences. While noting that these provisions had been qualified by the presidential decree of 1991, which authorised the use of firearms “only when absolutely necessary and when all less extreme methods have been exhausted”, the majority have found this “somewhat slender legal framework” to be insufficient to provide the level of protection “by law” of the right to life that is required in present-day democratic societies in Europe. Unlike the majority, we have found no clear evidence to suggest that the lack of control over the operation in the present case was attributable to any gap or deficiency in the level of protection provided by the relevant Greek law. In these circumstances, while we welcome the improvements in the law governing the carrying and use of firearms by police officers which were introduced in Greece in July 2003 (see paragraph 27 of the judgment), we have not found it to be either necessary or appropriate to examine in the abstract the compatibility with Article 2 of the legislative provisions in force at the relevant time (see McCann and Others v. the United Kingdom, judgment of 27 September 1995, Series A no. 324, p. 47, § 153) or to base our conclusion on any deficiency in those provisions.