CAT/C/66/D/820/2017 Annex Individual dissenting opinion of Abdelwahab Hani 1. The complainant filed an application for asylum in Switzerland on 19 and 20 September 2012. On 7 March 2016, the State Secretariat for Migration rejected this application because the complainant did not satisfy the requirements for refugee status in Switzerland. The appeal filed by the complainant against the expulsion order was dismissed by the Federal Administrative Court on 26 April 2016. The Committee notes that the request for review of the decision to return the complainant to Togo, following the emergence of new facts, was dismissed by the State Secretariat for Migration on 28 September 2016 and that this dismissal was upheld by the Federal Administrative Court on 2 November 2016. 2. The State party considers that the complainant did not justify her failure to comply with the time limit for appealing against the first decision of the State Secretariat for Migration and that, for this reason, the Federal Administrative Court rejected the request for a review of the expulsion order. It should be noted that the Swiss authorities took almost 42 months – an excessively long time1 – to reach a decision concerning her request, yet refused to grant her a 4-day extension of the deadline for an appeal. 3. The applicant showed due diligence in requesting an extension of the time limit after she had lodged an appeal outside that time limit, on 11 April 2016, against the decision to reject her initial application for asylum, issued on 7 March 2016. Relatively short time limits2 for filing appeals are not reasonable or compatible with the difficult and stressful situation in asylum seekers find themselves and thus at odds with the Committee’s jurisprudence.3 4. The complainant brought her case before the country’s highest authority in asylumrelated matters, which issued a final decision on her request, dismissing it on 2 November 2016. This second procedure prevails over the first and renders the irregularities of the first procedure null and void. 4 5. The complainant therefore exhausted all available domestic remedies. 6. The Committee should have found the complaint admissible under article 22 of the Convention with respect to the alleged violation of article 3 and proceeded to consider it on the merits. 1 2 3 4 GE.19-12298 See the Committee’s general comment No.4, para. 14. Ibid., para. 18 (e). Ibid., para. 29 (a) (vi). See also, inter alia, Ramírez Martínez et al. v. Mexico (CAT/C/55/D/500/2012), paras. 17.5 and 17.6; Gahungu v. Burundi (CAT/C/55/D/522/2012), para. 7.7; and X. v. Burundi (CAT/C/55/D/553/2013), paras. 7.5 and 7.6. See the Committee’s general comment No. 4, para. 41. 7