CCPR/C/117/D/2225/2012 Annex II Individual opinion of Committee member Yuval Shany (partly dissenting) 1. I associate myself with the individual opinion authored by Mr. Iwasawa with respect to the reasoning espoused by the majority on the Committee, underlying the finding of a violation of article 18 of the Covenant by the State party. For the reasons articulated in my individual opinion in Abdullayev v. Turkmenistan, I wish also to express doubts about the findings reached by the Committee with respect to the violation of article 14 (7) by the State party. 2. The author was tried in 2012 for refusing military service, but received only a light sentence — a conditional two-year sentence with one-year probation. It was only following his second trial in 2015, in which a new act of refusal to serve in the military was adjudicated, that he actually started serving a two-year prison sentence. Under these circumstances, it appears to me that, unlike the second conviction that resulted in a severe penalty, the author’s first conviction did not clearly reveal an intention by the State authorities to try and punish him for his refusal in principle to serve in the military (that is, for the “constant resolve” not to serve), as opposed to trial and punishment for one specific act of refusal. It is, in fact, unlikely that the conditional sentence imposed by the State party could have had the intended consequence of precluding it from trying the author for subsequent acts of refusal to serve (which might have activated the conditional sentence). Moreover, the result of adopting the approach taken by the majority, without considering the possibility that the first-in-time trial was not designed to punish the author for his “constant resolve” not to serve, might be to induce States parties to treat the first-in-time offence much more severely — not as a distinct “small” offence (a specific act of refusal), but as a serious offence of refusal in principle to military service, entailing a harsh sentence. I fail to see how pursuing this course of action would serve to advance the due process rights of individuals protected under the Covenant. 3. As a result, I do not consider it sufficiently well established that the author’s rights under article 14 (7) were violated in the circumstances of the present case. 4. Of course, one should be also mindful of the problem of repetitive trials for multiple acts of refusal to serve, as such a practice may lead to serious harassment and mistreatment of the affected individuals and to cumulative sentences of a disproportionate nature, and may raise issues under articles 7 and 9 of the Covenant. Such legal claims were not made, however, in the present case. 10