CCPR/C/126/D/2699/2015 Annex Individual opinion of Committee member José Manuel Santos Pais (dissenting) 1. I regret not being able to join the Committee’s decision in finding a violation of the author’s rights under article 7, read alone and in conjunction with 2 (3), and article 14 (3) (g) of the Covenant. 2. It has been the standing case law of the Committee that it is for the courts of States parties to evaluate the facts and the evidence in each case, or the application of domestic legislation, unless the evaluation is manifestly arbitrary or amounts to a denial of justice. Nonetheless, the Committee seems not to have followed this case law in the present case. 3. Regarding the violation of article 7 of the Covenant, the Committee first considered that the State party had not demonstrated with reliable evidence that no police officer had been involved in the author’s ill-treatment and bodily injuries and that the author’s health had not been satisfactory before apprehension by the police (para. 9.4). This, however, entails a probatio diabolica imposed on the State. How can a State prove the good health of a person, when the person in question has not yet come under its control? This is particularly relevant taking into account that the alleged good health of the author before his apprehension was mainly alleged by the author himself (paras. 7.6 and 7.7). 4. The Committee also considered that the State party failed to demonstrate satisfactorily that its authorities addressed the author’s allegations of torture and illtreatment in a meaningful way (para. 9.4). Since the State party has the duty to conduct a prompt, effective and independent investigation of all credible allegations of violations of article 7 of the Covenant, the Committee considered due weight needed to be given to the author’s allegations (para. 9.5). 5. This conclusion, however, does not seem to reflect accurately the facts of the present case. The State party rebutted the allegations of torture and ill-treatment (para. 6.1), explaining that the court of first instance had decided to give a central role to the depositions given by the author during the preliminary investigation when he was interrogated as an accused, and to the deposition of an eyewitness, which were corroborating and without major contradictions. These depositions were provided in a short period of time after the incriminating events, in the presence of a defence attorney and after the author had been informed about his rights. The author’s testimonies were consistent and also matched with the conclusions of the medical-forensic expert examination on the nature and the means of the occurrence of the bodily harm of the victim, the depositions of the witnesses and other evidence on file. 6. Analysing the evidence (para. 6.2), the Court concluded that it could not confirm the version of events presented by the defence on the beatings of the author by the police, since none of the witnesses had seen the infliction of bodily harm to the author first hand. The witnesses had only learned about it from the author’s explanations, and the witness testimonies were contradictory. Several witnesses affirmed that they had seen the author with a swollen face on 23 and 24 January 2013. All medical personnel in the ambulance on 23 January, on the other hand, confirmed that no visible damages could be identified. 7. The author alleges nonetheless (paras. 2.14 and 7.7) that medical record 53 of the Kstovsk Central Regional Hospital, dated 24 January 2013, indicates that on 23 and 24 January 2013, the author was hospitalized in the hospital’s traumatology department with the following diagnosis: “bruises of the soft tissues of the head”. In addition, an expert concluded on 5 November 2013 that injuries in the form of bruises of the soft tissues and of the head, as disclosed by the author, constituted a blunt trauma and could have occurred with the use of a blunt object, a hand or a bat. These injuries could have occurred on 23 January 2013 (the author was apprehended on 22 January 2013), but this conclusion is not sufficiently assertive. 8. In this regard, the State party reports (para. 6.4) that several witnesses testified that on 23 January 2013 the author complained of a headache as a result of the beatings. In court, 11