41 McCANN AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT considered under Articles 6 and 13 (art. 6, art. 13) of the Convention provisions (art. 6, art. 13) that have not been invoked by the applicants. 161. The Court confines itself to noting, like the Commission, that a general legal prohibition of arbitrary killing by the agents of the State would be ineffective, in practice, if there existed no procedure for reviewing the lawfulness of the use of lethal force by State authorities. The obligation to protect the right to life under this provision (art. 2), read in conjunction with the State’s general duty under Article 1 (art. 2+1) of the Convention to "secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms defined in [the] Convention", requires by implication that there should be some form of effective official investigation when individuals have been killed as a result of the use of force by, inter alios, agents of the State. 162. However, it is not necessary in the present case for the Court to decide what form such an investigation should take and under what conditions it should be conducted, since public inquest proceedings, at which the applicants were legally represented and which involved the hearing of seventy-nine witnesses, did in fact take place. Moreover, the proceedings lasted nineteen days and, as is evident from the inquest’s voluminous transcript, involved a detailed review of the events surrounding the killings. Furthermore, it appears from the transcript, including the Coroner’s summing-up to the jury, that the lawyers acting on behalf of the applicants were able to examine and cross-examine key witnesses, including the military and police personnel involved in the planning and conduct of the anti-terrorist operation, and to make the submissions they wished to make in the course of the proceedings. 163. In light of the above, the Court does not consider that the alleged various shortcomings in the inquest proceedings, to which reference has been made by both the applicants and the intervenors, substantially hampered the carrying out of a thorough, impartial and careful examination of the circumstances surrounding the killings. 164. It follows that there has been no breach of Article 2 para. 1 (art. 2-1) of the Convention on this ground. B. Application of Article 2 (art. 2) to the facts of the case 1. General approach to the evaluation of the evidence 165. While accepting that the Convention institutions are not in any formal sense bound by the decisions of the inquest jury, the Government submitted that the verdicts were of central importance to any subsequent examination of the deaths of the deceased. Accordingly, the Court should give substantial weight to the verdicts of the jury in the absence of any indication that those verdicts were perverse or ones which no reasonable tribunal of fact could have reached. In this connection, the jury was