Lord Hodge relied upon Bagdanavicius

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Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] 2 AC 668, which followed the approach adopted by the ECtHR in D v. UK (1997) 24 EHRR 423 and HLR v. France (1997) 26 EHRR 29. In Bagdanavicius, the House of Lords distinguished between cases where the risk of ill-treatment “emanates from the intentionally inflicted acts of the public authorities in the receiving country” (D v. UK, para 49) and those where the risk of harm arises from non-State actors. In that case, Lord Brown observed that the latter situation cannot trigger an Article 3 violation per se because ill-treatment cannot be committed by private individuals, no matter how severely the buy phone number list victim may have been treated (or how grave the risk of harm). However, he acknowledged that violence, or its threat, may be transformed into an Article 3 violation, if the receiving State fails to afford reasonable protection against it (para 24).

The Supreme Court concluded that the Othman criteria had been satisfied. Lord Hodge noted that the specific assurances, which had been given by senior officials in the ROC government, addressed the particular conditions of Dean’s detention – including concerns about his safety vis-à-vis other prisoners – and they had given British consular officials a credible monitoring role (para 38). Lord Hodge paid particular attention to the claim that the proposed protective regime would breach Article 3. He accepted that solitary confinement may qualify as ill-treatment, where it involved the ordering of complete sensory or prolonged social isolation (Ahmad v UK (2012) 56 EHRR 1, paras 207-210, cited para 41).