CCPR/C/121/D/2610/2015 14. Even a cursory analysis suggests that Castillo is an outlier in the Inter-American Court’s jurisprudence. The Court generally has been widely known, and admired, for its exacting scrutiny of investigations implicating the right to life. In cases both before and after Castillo, the Court either did not apply the test above, or readily found that an investigation’s shortcomings were indeed “contrary to objective standards” or “manifestly unreasonable”.4 15. Unfortunately, because the Court accepted the decision of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela not to pursue lines of investigation implicating paramilitaries and State authorities, and because the Committee defers to that decision, neither the Committee nor the Court has ever considered whether the investigation was adequate in the light of its full potential scope. 16. The Committee is correct that human rights commissions and courts are often better positioned to determine facts. However, this does not relieve the Committee of responsibility to independently examine a properly presented claim against the legal standards established by the Covenant. In my opinion, such an examination in this case would have yielded the conclusion that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela violated its obligations to conduct an independent, impartial, prompt, thorough, effective, credible and transparent investigation, as required by article 6. Measures of protection 17. The author also claims that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela failed to adequately protect the life and well-being of herself and her son following Mr. Castillo’s murder. With respect to this claim, it is uncontested that there were numerous attacks in the region against human rights defenders, including by paramilitaries; that in March 2001, Mr. Castillo obtained precautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission for displaced persons that the authorities did not implement, resulting in two deaths; that the author and her son were shot in the attack on Mr. Castillo and the author was the sole eyewitness; that the Apostolic Vicariate of Machiques began receiving threatening phone calls leading to closure of the office, where the author also worked; and that two days after the attack, the Inter-American Commission granted precautionary measures to protect the author and her son. 18. In finding the present claim inadmissible, the Committee cryptically concludes that the author did not provide sufficiently precise information regarding “the nature of the risk posed to her after leaving the border area of Zulia”. However, the record contains no suggestion that the author and her son no longer needed protection once they had moved to Miranda immediately after the attack. To the contrary, both parties’ submissions clearly recognize that the need for protection continued. The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in particular, does not contend that the need for protection diminished, but emphasizes that the Miranda prosecutor and court sought and entered measures of protection — measures that the author contends were ultimately entered and renewed four times between 2003 and 2007. The author, however, contends that the police took no action to protect her and her son in this period, when such protection was most urgently needed. The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela also presents no evidence that the police actually implemented the court orders. It states only that the prosecutor’s office eventually made efforts to locate the author, apparently in 2011, 2015 and thereafter (paras. 6.4−6.5 and note 8). 4 See, e.g., Garibaldi v. Brazil, Judgment of 23 September 2009, para. 122 (“the State did not seek exhaustively to identify possible witnesses and obtain statements that would have allowed the facts concerning [the victim’s] death to be clarified”); Cepeda Vargas v. Colombia, Judgment of 26 May 2010, para. 119 (the State is obligated to investigate all patterns of possible responsibility, not only the crime scene); Barrios Family v. Venezuela, Judgment of 24 November 2011, paras. 236 ff; Human Rights Defender et al. v. Guatemala, Judgment of 28 August 2014, para. 214 (“omissions must be avoided in the gathering of evidence and in following the logical lines of investigation”); Landaeta Mejias Brothers et al. v. Venezuela, Judgment of 27 August 2014, para. 234 (failure to conduct ballistic comparison of other guns and “to exhaust all the lines of investigation in order to discover the truth”); Garífuna Punta Piedra Community and its members v. Honduras, Judgment of 8 October 2015, para. 298 (“The investigation with due diligence requires taking into account what happened in other homicides and establishing some type of relationship between them”). 15