5.  The applicant was born in 1950 and lives in Budapest. 6.  On 11 September 2000, at about 7 p.m., the applicant became involved in an animated dispute, of unclear background, with four plain-clothed police officers. After certain disputed incidents, three of them handcuffed him, banged his head against the bonnet of his car and then started to kick him. Subsequently he was committed to the Budapest VIII District Police Department, where he alleges his beating continued; Sergeant P. also insulted him verbally. Thereupon he was locked up in a ward for several hours; later on he was taken to Honvéd Hospital for a medical check-up. The Department of Traumatology established that he had the following injuries: bruises on the back of the head and on both sides of the chest; multiple suffusions on the back; contusions of the renal region on both sides; contusion around the spleen. 7.  The next day the applicant filed a criminal complaint against the police officers involved. On 30 June 2003 the Budapest Investigation Office discontinued the investigation. Relying on the opinion of forensic expert Dr M., the Office was satisfied that the lesions sustained by the applicant did not prove that he had been ill-treated. 8.  Simultaneously, criminal proceedings were initiated against the applicant on charges of drunken driving and violence against an official. However, on 28 April 2005 he was acquitted. 9.  In the ill-treatment case, the applicant filed a motion for private prosecution. On 12 October 2006 the Székesfehérvár District Court acquitted the police officers. The court dismissed the opinions of three private medical experts supporting the applicant’s version of the events, and accepted the version of the accused police officers, according to which the car driven by the applicant on the night of the events had created a traffic obstacle, he had been drunk, refused to abide by the instructions of the police officers and insulted them, and the injuries he had sustained had been caused by lawful coercion. 10.  On 24 April 2008 the Győr Court of Appeal dismissed the applicant’s appeal, arguing that the police measure was necessary and proportionate. It held inter alia as follows:
“... [T]he private substitute prosecutor’s statement of serious and lasting ill-treatment could not be verified by any of the experts. They all, however, stated that the injuries [sustained] could result from the applicant’s resistance to the coercive measure and the fact that he had need to be forced down on the ground.” 11.  In the context of the incident, the applicant also brought an official liability action against the Budapest Police Department, the Attorney General’s Office and other respondents.
On 28 January 2008 the Budapest Regional Court dismissed the claim. On appeal, on 18 November 2008 the Budapest Court of Appeal reversed this judgment and ordered each of the two main respondents to pay the applicant 500,000 Hungarian forints[1] as compensation for having unlawfully prosecuted him for drunken driving and for violence against an official. Without addressing the issue of the alleged police brutality, the Court of Appeal established that there had been irregularities concerning the measuring of the applicant’s level of blood alcohol, noted that it had not been sufficiently clarified if he had been in the act of driving at all, and found that his conduct had not been proven to have physically countered the police measure in question.
On 29 March 2010 the Supreme Court upheld this judgment.