CAT/C/61/D/720/2015 post-traumatic stress disorder. 25 He further argues that understanding of the effects of trauma was within the Tribunal’s purview. The Tribunal had at its disposal a document entitled Guidance on Vulnerable Persons, which was prepared for use by the Migration Review Tribunal and the Refugee Review Tribunal, and in which a lengthy section is dedicated to impairments associated with torture and other traumatic experience. The Guidance suggests strategies to use when dealing with people with such impairment. The complainant claims there is no evidence that the Refugee Review Tribunal applied any of them. The complainant, on the other hand, is not trained in psychology and had only his experience to go on, and he did not have the language to provide a more convincing explanation. Therefore he was limited to describing his symptoms as “affected memory” and attributing the cause as being the detention and the beatings. 5.6 In that regard, the complainant refers to the Committee’s practice in such contexts, in recognizing that inconsistencies are to be expected from people who have suffered trauma. 26 He claims that, in fact, the Tribunal ignored its own guidelines on vulnerable people such as victims of trauma, especially with respect to credibility findings. The Tribunal simply found that there was a discrepancy and that the complainant could not satisfactorily explain it, therefore he embellished his claims. In other words, he lied. The complainant also affirms that he secured a witness statement27 in support of his contention that he was detained for over a month by the Army in 2009. 5.7 The complainant reiterates that it was obvious that the security forces suspected him, albeit, along with others, of involvement in the bomb blast, which is to say, involvement with LTTE. The Tribunal raised the possibility that the police were seeking a bribe; however, that is not necessarily a motive exclusive of the former: the bribe was sought because the police felt that it had grounds to detain him, that is, suspicion of involvement in the bomb attack. It is unreasonable to attempt to separate one possible motive from the other, and then attribute the actions to one motive and not to the other in the absence of further evidence. The complainant alleges that the Tribunal indulged in pure speculation about the motives of the persecutors, for which it had no evidence. The complainant reiterates that insufficient benefit of the doubt relating to the accepted fact of trauma was accorded to him. 5.8 The complainant also disputes the Tribunal’s reasoning in accepting that the police visited his home, but attributing the motive as being merely in response to a report made by his family that he was missing. Instead, the complainant contends that the report about his disappearance was made by his family following the visit in order to prevent further visits. It is very difficult to imagine his family’s motive for make a missing person report with regard to the complainant if the sequence of events were as the Tribunal speculated. His family knew where he was, so reporting him as missing was not an attempt to discover his whereabouts. Reporting to the police that he was missing so that the police would visit the house seems an extraordinary strategy upon which to embark: the supposed desired result of inciting a visit from the police would be of very small advantage to the family or the complainant and of considerable risk because it would be attracting the attention of the police in circumstances where the person in question had been “a person of interest” (in a non-technical sense) to the police, who, according to the Tribunal’s speculation, would have had no other interest. The motivation for the family to behave in this speculated fashion is unclear and unlikely and the Tribunal is silent on that aspect. The complainant was generally considered to be a credible witness, except for, as the complainant contends, the unreasonable negative findings by the Tribunal. 25 26 27 10 There is no medical certificate in the file. See David Weissbrodt and Isabel Hortreiter, “The principle of non-refoulement: Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in comparison with the non-Refoulement provisions of other international human rights treaties”, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, vol. 5 (1999), available at http://scholarship.law.umn.edu /faculty_articles/362; also communication No.15/1994, Khan v. Canada, Views adopted on 15 November 1994. No such witness statement is on file.