CCPR/C/130/D/3599/2019 Annex I Joint opinion of Committee members David H. Moore, Vasilka Sancin, José Manuel Santos Pais, Yuval Shany and Gentian Zyberi (concurring) 1. We support the Views of the Committee that it is unreasonable to construe the obligations of States parties under the Optional Protocol as allowing for a review of tragic incidents that occurred long before the adoption of the Covenant (41 years) and of the Optional Protocol (49 years), and that the authors should have exercised a certain degree of diligence in pursuing their claims before the Committee without serious delay after the ratification by Spain of the Optional Protocol, notwithstanding the continuing nature of the crime of enforced disappearances. 2. We wish to underscore that the fact-finding tools available to the Committee do not allow it to effectively establish the historical truth about events that, as in the present case, occurred in the distant past, in the context of a bitter and tragic civil war, and that have left deep scars on Spanish society to the present day. 3. Furthermore, the long passage of time, which considerably exceeds the presumed lifespan of the victims, had they not been killed during the Spanish Civil War, and that of the perpetrators of the crimes in question, renders unsuitable the normal doctrines developed by the Committee in relation to the prompt and effective investigation of past crimes, which assume the availability of sufficient forensic evidence and witnesses, and are directed at holding living perpetrators legally accountable. In the same vein, it is difficult to rely so many decades after the events on legal doctrines developed to consider enforced disappearance as a continuing offence, which are largely premised on the assumption that the victim may still be alive and that a remedy of release may still be necessary. 4. We believe that the remedy for the authors’ plight and their entitlement to obtain some sense of closure in respect of the historical injustice suffered by their relatives is to be found in the recent process undertaken by the State party to address its difficult past and the problem of historical memory, to establish the truth about the events and to identify and commemorate the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship. Such efforts will continue to be monitored by the Committee in the context of the periodic review of Spain, in light of the interrelationship between dealing with a tragic past and the existence of a human rightsrespecting culture in the State party, allowing for the healing of deep and enduring wounds. To the extent that the individual rights of living family members are directly affected by recent acts or omissions by Spain in the process of addressing its past, the exercise of quasijudicial review under the Optional Protocol might also be appropriate, subject to admissibility requirements such as lack of undue delay and exhaustion of domestic remedies. Still, a quasijudicial review of the rights of the victims of the Civil War themselves, as in the present case, conducted some 85 years after the facts, exceeds the temporal scope of powers vested in the Committee, as well as its functional fact-finding capacity. 14 GE.21-06035