CEDAW/C/59/D/59/2013 regarding her religion. The author’s employer had forbidden her to have religious pictures and objects on view at her workplace, where the author also lived. 4.4 The Board found that, although the author had had to exercise her religion discreetly, she could not be considered to be specifically and individually persecuted by the Chinese authorities on religious grounds. It also found that the background information describing the conditions for Catholics in Fujian Province in general terms could not give rise to the conclusion that the author must be considered to be at risk of being subjected to persecution justifying asylum for the purposes of section 7 (1) of the Aliens Act if returned to China. 4.5 In its overall assessment, the Board took into consideration the fact that the author’s departure had not been caused by a specific situation, but that, according to her, she had felt under pressure from her former partner and the lack of contact with her own family, as well as from her situation in terms of work, home and religion. The Board also took into consideration the fact that the author had spent four or five months in Denmark before applying for asylum and did so only when the police found her. 4.6 The State party further 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 pr esence of an interpreter and the possibility for an asylum seeker to make a statement on appeal. It also notes that the Board has a comprehensive collection of general background material on the situation in the countries from which Denmark receives asylum seekers, updated and supplemented on a continuous basis from various recognized sources, and it takes it into consideration when assessing cases. 4.7 Regarding the admissibility of the communication, the State party observes that the author submitted that, if returned to China, she would be subjected to gender-based violence because her former partner had hit her when she had sought to see their child, had refused to allow her even to see the child and had threatened to hit her if they met again. The author admits not having sought protection from the authorities because, in her place of origin, it was normal for men to hit women. Furthermore, she submitted that having to exercise her religion discreetly was a breach of article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 4.8 The State party considers, first, that the communication is inadmissible as manifestly ill-founded and insufficiently substantiated under article 4 (2)(c) of the Optional Protocol. It notes that the author seeks to a pply the obligations under the Convention in an extraterritorial manner. With reference to the Committee’s decision in communication No. 33/2011, M.N.N. v. Denmark, the State party notes that from the Committee’s reasoning it appears that the Convention ha s extraterritorial effect only when the woman being returned will be exposed to a real, personal and foreseeable risk of serious forms of gender-based violence. It is, moreover, a requirement that the necessary and foreseeable consequence is that the woman’s rights under the Convention will be violated in another jurisdiction. 4.9 In the State party’s view, this means that acts of States parties that may have an indirect effect on a person’s rights under the Convention in other States can entail responsibility for the acting State party (extraterritorial effect) only under exceptional circumstances in which the person to be returned is at risk of being deprived of the right to life or of being exposed to torture or other inhuman or 14-67404 5/10