CCPR/C/126/D/2302/2013 Annex [Original: French] Individual opinion (partly dissenting) of Committee member Hélène Tigroudja 1. While I agree with the Committee’s decision to find a violation of article 18 of the Covenant, I cannot support its decision to declare inadmissible all the claims made in relation to article 7 of the Covenant – the prohibition of ill-treatment – as I consider this to be at odds with the Committee’s well-established jurisprudence concerning the same types of allegations, the same context and the same State party. 2. With regard to article 7 of the Covenant, the authors’ claims in the present case are threefold: first, the authors claim that they were subjected to abuse during their arrest or detention; then, they raise the issue of the inhuman nature of their placement in detention, since it is their religious beliefs that prevented them from fulfilling their military obligations; and lastly, they complain about the conditions of detention in the labour camp (paras. 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5). 3. I support the conclusions of the Committee regarding the first two claims, which could have been more fully substantiated. 1 However, in the light of the Committee’s existing jurisprudence,2 the issue of the conditions of detention merited closer examination. 4. In many of its Views,3 the Committee has accepted evidence of a not substantially different nature which demonstrated that the labour camp in which the authors of the communications were held was situated in a desert, with extreme weather conditions in winter and summer; that hygiene and living conditions were deplorable; that it offered no access to organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross; and, above all, that prisoners were completely unable to complain about their treatment without facing reprisals. 5. In these cases, four fundamental elements stand out. First, the Committee accepted general information, such as a 2010 report by independent lawyers, as evidence of the nature of conditions of detention. Second, the Committee endorsed the concluding observations of the Committee against Torture on the initial report of Turkmenistan, which detail the inhuman conditions of detention in the labour camp. Third, the Committee noted that, in view of the risk of reprisals and the fact that there were no effective domestic remedies, the authors were under no obligation to exhaust domestic remedies. Fourth, the Committee repeatedly chose to raise motu proprio a violation of article 10 of the Covenant, even though the authors had not done so.4 6. It is therefore reasonable to infer from this previously established jurisprudence of the Committee that the objective conditions of detention in the labour camp are incompatible with the Covenant. However, in order to explain its finding of inadmissibility in the present case, the Committee tersely indicates that the authors have not provided sufficient information or evidence of having been personally ill-treated or subjected to harsh prison conditions and that they have not complained to the authorities about the alleged violations. The Committee considers that, given the limited information on file and 1 2 3 4 GE.19-19105 In a previous case, the Committee rejected the claim under article 7 of the Covenant regarding prosecution for religious beliefs: Nurjanov v. Turkmenistan, para. 8.4. Nasyrlayev v. Turkmenistan, paras. 2.5 and 8.3. In addition to those discussed in footnote 2 above, see Uchetov v. Turkmenistan. See, for example, Japparow v. Turkmenistan, paras. 1.1, 3.2, 7.2 and 7.3; Hudaybergenov v. Turkmenistan (CCPR/C/115/D/2221/2012), paras. 1.1, 3.2 and 7.3; and Abdullayev v. Turkmenistan, paras. 1.1, 3.3 and 7.3. In this last case, the Committee described as “detailed” the authors’ evidence concerning the “deplorable living conditions” in the prison (para. 7.3), yet that evidence was the same as that provided in the present case, including the 2010 report by independent lawyers and the concluding observations of the Committee against Torture on the initial report of Turkmenistan. 7