KURT JUDGMENT OF 25 MAY 1998 27 (a) in defence of any person from unlawful violence; (b) in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained; (c) in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection.” 101. The applicant stressed that her son’s disappearance occurred in a context which was life-threatening. She requested the Court to base itself on the approach taken by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the Velásquez Rodríguez v. Honduras case (judgment of 29 July 1988) as well as by the United Nations Human Rights Committee in the Mojica v. Dominican Republic case (decision of 15 July 1994) to the issue of enforced disappearances (see paragraphs 65–71 above) and to find the respondent State in breach of its positive obligation under Article 2 to protect her son’s life. Such a finding could be reached, she maintained, even though there may not exist specific evidence that her son had died at the hands of the authorities of the respondent State. 102. In an alternative submission, the applicant asserted that there existed a well-documented high incidence of torture, unexplained deaths in custody as well as of “disappearances” in south-east Turkey which not only gave rise to a reasonable presumption that the authorities were in breach of their obligation to protect her son’s life under Article 2 but, in addition, constituted compelling evidence of a practice of “disappearances” such as to ground a claim that her son was also the victim of an aggravated violation of that provision. She contended that the Inter-American Court in the abovementioned Velásquez Rodríguez v. Honduras judgment of 29 July 1988 was prepared to draw the conclusion that the respondent State in that case had violated the right to life provision of the American Convention on Human Rights on the existence of either sort of evidence. 103. The applicant further submitted that the Court’s own case-law provided two additional reasons why the respondent State should be found to be in breach of Article 2, given that it had been established that her son had been taken into custody on 25 November 1993 and has not been seen since. In the first place, the authorities had failed to provide any convincing explanation as to how he had met his presumed death. Having regard to the approach taken by the Court in its Tomasi v. France judgment of 27 August 1992 (Series A no. 241-A) to evidence of ill-treatment of a detainee, she reasoned that a similar approach should be taken, mutatis mutandis, in respect of the presumed death of her son. Secondly, and with reference to the McCann and Others judgment previously cited, the applicant maintained that the failure of the authorities to conduct a prompt, thorough and effective investigation into her son’s disappearance must in itself be seen as a separate violation of Article 2.