CCPR/C/132/D/3105/2018 Annex Joint opinion of Committee members Yadh Ben Achour and Hélène Tigroudja (concurring) 1. While we fully concur with the position of the Committee on the substance of the claims and with its conclusion (para. 9),1 in other words that the facts disclose a violation of the right to life, the right to individual liberty and the right to a fair trial, we hereby express our discomfort on a procedural but critical aspect of the case regarding the nonimplementation by Belarus of the interim measures issued by the Committee and the lack of cooperation of the State throughout the process. 2. In February 2018, the Committee requested the State party not to carry out the death sentence imposed on the author’s son while the case was under examination by the Committee (para. 1.2). However, several months after the request, the Committee was informed that the author’s son had been executed (para. 1.3). Belarus provided no clarification for such a blatant violation of the interim measures and its duty to cooperate with the Committee. 3. Our discomfort arises from the fact that the wrongful behaviour of Belarus has not been well captured by the Committee in its Views – nor has it been well captured in other decisions either – and it is time for the Committee to modify and clarify its position. Under the heading “Lack of cooperation by the State party”, which is located before the section headed “Issues and proceedings before the Committee”, the State’s acts are analysed. In paragraph 6.4, the Committee uses strong language to qualify the State’s acts and reiterates that a State party commits serious violations of its obligations under the Optional Protocol if it acts to prevent or frustrate consideration by the Committee of a communication alleging a violation of the Covenant, or to render examination by the Committee moot and the expression of its Views concerning the implementation of the obligations of the State party under the Covenant nugatory and futile. This is in line with its previous jurisprudence and the position of other international courts, tribunals and bodies addressing States’ international obligation to respect interim or precautionary measures.2 4. Therefore, there is no legal justification for separating the section on lack of cooperation from the section on issues and proceedings. On the contrary, doing so blurs the legal reasoning of the Committee and the message sent to States parties. At the end of paragraph 9, the Committee concludes that, by not respecting its request for interim measures, the State party violated its obligations under article 1 of the Optional Protocol. This clearly demonstrates that the Committee did indeed find a violation of an international procedural obligation, namely the obligation of States parties to the Optional Protocol to provide effective access to the individual complaints mechanism of the Committee. Consequently, the non-implementation of the interim measures should have been addressed in the section on issues and proceedings.3 Procedural obligations are international obligations that States are responsible for implementing. 5. Some scholars have explicitly called for the improvement of judicial practices and, especially, stressed that “international adjudicators should indicate legal consequences of 1 2 3 10 Unless otherwise indicated, the paragraph numbers in parentheses refer to the Views of the Committee. See European Court of Human Rights, Mamatkulov and Askarov v. Turkey, application Nos. 46827/99 and 46951/99, Judgment, 4 February 2005, paras. 99 ff. See also the Nijmegen principles and guidelines on interim measures for the protection of human rights, drafted by a group of scholars in 2021 (available at www.ru.nl/law/ster/research/nijmegen-principles-and-guidelines-oninterim/read-the-nijmegen-principles-2021/). In fact, in other Views adopted at the same session, the Committee adopted a different approach and included the paragraphs on lack of cooperation and on the non-implementation of interim measures in the issues and proceedings section. See, for example, F.F.J.H. v. Argentina (CCPR/C/132/D/3238/2018).