EL HASKI v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT 27 they observed that the Committee against Torture seemed to require the author to demonstrate that his or her allegations were “well founded” – adding, however, that some legal writers took the view, in the light of that jurisprudence, that it was sufficient for the alleged victim to submit “some evidence” of ill-treatment – and that this view was supported by domestic case-law. In the United States of America, the US District Court for Columbia had merely verified that the petitioning detainees had made “sufficient allegations” (Re Guantánamo Detainee Cases, 31 January 2005); in Canada, the Supreme Court of British Columbia had looked at the “persuasive nature of the allegations” (India v. Singh, 8 May 1996); and the Supreme Court of the Netherlands had examined whether the allegations were “plausible” (Hoge Raad, judgment no. 103.094, 1 October 1996). In the submission of the third-party interveners, most of the case-law indicated that the burden of proof could not rest with either the individual or the State alone (they referred, inter alia, to the Human Rights Committee’s decision in Saimijon and Bazarov v. Uzbekistan). They said that this had also been the approach of the House of Lords in A. and others, cited above. 79. The third-party interveners further observed that under Article 15 of the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment it had to be “established” that the statement in question had been obtained by torture for the exclusionary rule to apply, and that similar wording was used in Article 10 of the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture and in Article 12 of the United Nations Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as in the jurisprudence of the Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee. They added that in the case of A. and others, cited above, the House of Lords had considered the meaning of “established” in the context of the above-mentioned Article 15: the majority (four Law Lords out of seven) had interpreted it as requiring evidence to be excluded where it was “more likely than not” that torture had been used to obtain it; in the same vein, the Hamburg Court of Appeal, in its El Motassadeq judgment, cited above, had used certain testimonies despite the fact that serious doubts remained as to how they had been obtained. The interveners were, however, convinced by the opinion of the minority of Law Lords in the above-cited A. and others judgment, to the effect that the exclusionary rule had to apply where there was a “real risk” that evidence had been obtained by torture. In their view, the position of the majority of the Law Lords called into question the sharing of the burden of proof between the State and the defendant, by imposing on the latter too high a burden that in most cases would be impossible to meet. In their view, the fact that the evidence in question was intended to be used against someone accused of terrorism-related offences could not justify such a shift; they referred to the Court’s finding in Hulki Güneş v. Turkey (no. 28490/95,

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