CAT/C/46/D/350/2008 4.8 To his request for review dated 11 January 2005 and his appeal to the Swiss Asylum Appeals Commission dated 27 January 2005, the complainant attached a press release and a look-out notice posted on the Internet site www.societecivile.cd on 15 October 2004, which indicated that the non-governmental organization Action contre les violations des droits des personnes vulnérables (Action against Violations of the Rights of Vulnerable Persons) (ACVDP) was searching for him. In an e-mail sent to the complainant’s counsel on 18 February 2005, the President of ACVDP, Crispin Kobolongo, confirmed that GJCC had informed him of the complainant’s abduction and that this information had prompted ACVDP to speak with the president of GJCC and the complainant’s wife. She had confirmed that her husband had been abducted, that she had been raped on the same day, and that her husband had since been missing. It was because the investigations to ascertain the complainant’s whereabouts had reportedly proved fruitless that the look-out notice and press release had been issued. However, the complainant’s family — specifically his wife and his uncle — had had mobile telephone, fax and e-mail contact with the complainant while he was confined to Zurich airport in late September and early October 2004, and were therefore aware of his whereabouts. The State party concludes from this that the wife’s sole interest in having the notice published was to provide her husband with documentary evidence to support his asylum application in Switzerland. The fact that the complainant himself provided this supposedly convincing evidence in 2005, when he had actually been in telephone contact with his wife at least two weeks before its publication, further discredits the complainant and his entourage. 4.9 In support of his appeal dated 27 January 2005, the complainant also submitted the notice of his disappearance published in the biweekly newspaper Le Satellite on 22 October 2004. In this notice, his family urged readers to report any information that might help ascertain his whereabouts to a family member or the police. The State party finds it incongruous that the family should urge readers of the newspaper to facilitate the police’s efforts to ascertain the complainant’s whereabouts. Noting that the issue of the wanted person notice by the National Intelligence Agency on 10 November was also contrived, the State party underlines that both the notice dated 19 September 2004 and the summons dated 26 September 2004 (in which the complainant’s wife was asked to report to the police station the next day at 10.30 a.m.) have very little evidentiary value. The two documents, both of which were signed by Clément Konde, had been issued a week apart, each on a Sunday, when offices are usually closed. The State party notes that the Swiss authorities generally doubted the evidentiary value either of the summonses (which are for the most part faxed copies) or of the articles published in the press or on the Internet. It also notes that in Kinshasa it is easy to obtain such documents for payment. 4.10 In his request for review dated 8 April 2008, the complainant claimed that, after losing all contact for several years, he had finally managed to find his wife in March 2008. She had supposedly informed him that she had left Kinshasa in 2005, as the Congolese authorities’ efforts to find the complainant were putting her in danger. Before leaving to request asylum in Zimbabwe at the end of 2007, she had reportedly spent most of the time living with her parents in the centre of the country. The Federal Administrative Court considered that, since the complainant’s wife could easily have found people in contact with her husband since his disappearance, the couple’s claims of a total loss of contact, with contact re-established only a few days after the complainant was informed of the imminent outcome of his appeal, were hardly convincing. 4.11 Lastly, the State party notes that the assessment made by the Federal Office for Migration in the first asylum proceedings, in which it had concluded that the complainant lacked credibility, was shared by UNHCR, to which the case had been referred on 27 GE.11-43878 7

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