CEDAW/C/69/D/85/2015 3.7 Lastly, the author states that she had her child on her lap at the time of her interviews with the Danish Immigration Service, which confused her and, accordingly, had an impact on the statements that she gave regarding the grounds for her asylum application. She argues that that constitutes a separate violation of the Convention, because women with small children are disadvantaged compared with men, who are never placed in such distracting and stressful situations. State party’s observations on admissibility and the merits 4.1 On 23 October 2015, the State party submitted its observations on admissibility and the merits of the communication. It recalls the principal facts on which the present communication is based and reiterates the main findings contained in the decision handed down by the Refugee Appeals Board on 8 April 2015. 4.2 The State party provides a comprehensive description of the organization, composition, duties, prerogatives and jurisdiction of the Board and the guarantees for asylum seekers, including legal representation, the presence of an interpreter and the possibility for asylum seekers to make a statement on appeal. It notes that the Board has a comprehensive collection of general background material on the situation in countries from which the State party receives asylum seekers, updated and supplemented on a continual basis from various recognized sources, all of which it takes into consideration when assessing cases. 4.3 The State party recalls that, under the Committee’s jurisprudence, the Convention has extraterritorial effect only when the person to be returned will be exposed to a real, personal and foreseeable risk of serious forms of gender-based violence. 7 In that regard, the State party asserts that she has failed to establish a prima facie case for the purpose of the admissibility of her communication under article 4 (2) (c) of the Optional Protocol, because the author has not substantiated sufficiently that she would run such a risk if she were returned to Somalia. The communication should therefore be considered manifestly ill -founded and, consequently, inadmissible. 4.4 Should the Committee find the communication to be admissible and proceed with its consideration of the merits, the State party asserts that the author has not sufficiently established that she would run a real, personal and foreseeable risk of serious forms of gender-based violence if returned to Somalia. 4.5 The State party disagrees with the author’s view that the Board’s assessment of her credibility seems “far-fetched”. In the decision of 8 April 2015, the Board found unanimously that her statement regarding the grounds for her asylum application should be rejected in its entirety because she had been vague about all crucial elements 8 and unable to substantiate the grounds that she put forward for being granted asylum. Contrary to what is claimed by the author, the Board provided a detailed account of why it could not accept her statement as factual. 4.6 The State party further recalls that the Danish Immigration Service had requested language analysis testing of the author prior to the Board hearing on 8 April 2015. The findings of the test, which were included in the Board ’s assessment of the case, linked the author’s linguistic background with a high degree of certainty to north-western Somalia and showed that it was unlikely to be, as the author had insisted, the Hiraan region of Somalia. __________________ 7 8 18-06600 See M.N.N. v. Demark (CEDAW/C/55/D/33/2011). The Board found that, among other things, the author had made vague statements about her meetings with H., including whether he had worn a niqab when they had met at t he home of N., the author’s friend. It also found that the author had made a vague statement about her Facebook account, opened in the name of C.B. 5/14