CCPR/C/117/D/2443/2014 her disagreement with the assessment made by the Board. She failed to identify any irregularity in the decision-making process or any risk factors that the Board had failed to take properly into account. The State party believes that the author is actually attempting to use the Committee as an appellate body and have the factual circumstances of her case reassessed. The Committee must give considerable weight to the facts found by the national authorities and the Refugee Appeals Board, which is better placed to assess all the factual circumstances of the author’s case. Authors’ comments on the State party’s observations 5.1 In her comments of 23 February 2015, the author states that, according to information from her neighbours, the authorities in Chechnya (both federal and local) keep monitoring her house. The local police and federal authorities have also asked the author’s brother about her whereabouts but have not delivered any written summonses to him. 5.2 With regard to the summonses, she claims that she delivered them to the State party’s authorities as soon as she received them and that she had not known about their existence at an earlier stage. The summonses were given to the author’s brother, who gave them to her daughter, but her daughter visits Chechnya only every second month. 5.3 The author also claims that, in 2010, after her son escaped to Denmark, she fled to Ingushetia, where her daughter and son-in-law lived, because the authorities continually came and inquired about her son. At the time, the authorities were not pursuing her, only her son, but she feared that “they would suddenly start causing problems for her”, as they often came after close family members of former rebels. The author thus felt harassed by the authorities, although she was not actually assaulted at that time. 5.4 The authorities began to target the author when she returned to Chechnya, moved back to her house and opened a small bread store. They claimed that she was not only a rebel sympathizer, but a rebel herself. After being arrested, during the interrogations, the author refused to sign a statement that she had not only sold bread to the rebels, but also that she had willingly helped the rebels. She was beaten many times with rubber clubs all over her body and finally electricity was administered through her fingers. She still had marks from the beatings on her right arm, where welts could be felt. After the punches and electric shocks, she fainted and has no recollection how she was transported to the hospital. 5.5 According to the State party, the author’s son is not a high-profile member of a Chechen rebel group. According to the author, however, a suspected rebel need not have a high profile to be targeted by the authorities. 5.6 The State party finds it unlikely that the author was able to escape from the hospital. The author submits that she was assisted by a young nurse, a friend of her niece. Subsequently, that nurse faced problems and fled Chechnya. The nurse dressed the author in a white lab coat and a white cap. They left the hospital through the main entrance at around noon, a time when there were many people in the facility. The author was taken away by private taxi, a common means of transportation. The trip from the hospital in Grozny to Nazran where the author’s daughter lives took about one and a half hours. 5.7 As to her credibility, the author argues that she has been subjected to torture and that people with legal backgrounds are not the best positioned to assess whether torture has taken place. Such an assessment should be made by specialists with the required expertise. She refers to the Committee against Torture finding in Rong v. Australia,9 according to 9 See communication No. 416/2010, Rong v. Australia, decision adopted on 5 November 2012, para. 7.5. 7