CAT/C/71/D/884/2018 from freely raising their claims for protection. Additionally, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has included the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist organization on its consolidated list since 21 December 2001. According to the complainant, he did not initially mention his time with the Tamil Tigers or his arrest and torture over the weapons possession incident owing both to his fear of an adverse assessment by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization and to his inability to speak about having been subjected to atrocious forms of torture. He notes that according to the reports by the psychologist from the New South Wales Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors, he suffered extreme distress when recalling the torture that he had experienced. 4 5.2 The complainant notes that the Refugee Review Tribunal rejected his claims without the benefit of forensic and clinical reports. He considers that the 2010 arrest and torture over the weapons possession incident was rejected principally because it had not been raised at his first interview, and because the applicant was slow in answering questions during the interview, which was perceived as being evasive. The Tribunal did not have the medical evidence before it and was therefore not aware of his psychological medical conditions relating to his experience of torture. As the Tribunal had found that this claim was fabricated and that the complainant was not a witness of truth, it subsequently disbelieved all of his other claims for protection. The complainant considers that the subsequent applications for ministerial intervention and submission of new evidence were rejected on the basis of the Tribunal’s finding that the applicant was not a witness of truth. 5.3 According to the complainant, the member of the Refugee Review Tribunal lacked training in assessing whether a person was displaying symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He submits that discussing matters of torture, especially of sexual torture, has been deeply traumatic to him, and discussing and disclosing these events brings feelings of deep shame, in particular when questioned about them by a female officer in an adversarial setting. The interviewing officer in the complainant’s entry interview, his Government-appointed representative during the protection visa application process, the delegate of the Minister conducting the protection visa interview and the Tribunal member conducting the hearing were all female. The complainant notes that at no stage was he asked whether his claims or the presentation thereof were gender-sensitive, which amounted to a practical injustice. 5.4 As to his trip to India, the complainant submits that it happened in 2012 and not in 2010 as suggested by the State party. According to the complainant, he had two Sri Lankan passports, fraudulently obtained through an agent. One had been obtained in 2007 and the other in 2012, and they showed different spellings of his name, different birth dates and different national identity card numbers. He travelled to India using his 2012 passport, and he stayed for two weeks in a refugee camp in Tamil Nadu. Scans of both passports were submitted to the Minister on 18 September 2019 with his request for ministerial intervention. However, since he did not provide the original of his 2012 passport, it was ruled that the genuineness of the document could not be assessed and no weight was given to the document. The complainant argues that the Minister did not give genuine consideration to the document scan, since the Department of Home Affairs could have had the document checked by its document examination unit. He notes that since the authorities in Sri Lanka could identify that he has used a fraudulent passport in the past, he is at further risk of remand and imprisonment for up to five years under domestic law. 5.5 The complainant submits that the State party failed to consider his arrest warrant as part of his request for ministerial intervention. In his ruling, the Assistant Director at the Department of Home Affairs stated that there was reason to doubt the genuineness of the document, given that the High Commission of Sri Lanka did not advise the Australian Border Force of any match to an arrest warrant when the latter sought a travel document for the complainant’s removal, and, similarly, Colombo Post did not mention a match against any Sri Lankan databases when his name was provided for clearance for removal. On this basis, and given the finding by the Refugee Review Tribunal that the complainant was not a credible witness, the Assistant Director did not believe that there was an outstanding warrant for his 4 6 www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/immigration/2018/02/03/exclusive-all-57-asio-refugee-casewarnings-revised-after-review). The complainant notes that there have been three such reports, the most recent dated 14 August 2019.