CAT/C/54/D/544/2013 Complainant’s comments on the State party’s submission 6.1 On 6 February 2014, the complainant submitted his comments on the State party’s submission (para. 4.1). In the first place, he highlights his continuing political engagement, which, coupled with the fact that he has been arrested and tortured in the past, place him at a real risk of being subjected to torture if forcibly returned to Turkey. 6.2 Secondly, he notes that the State party, like the Federal Office of Migration in its decisions, has wrongly assessed the political situation in Turkey. And yet the Federal Administrative Court rejected this assessment in a recent ruling, in which it recognized that proven or assumed members of organizations such as the PKK, which are deemed to be dangerous to the State, are at particular risk of being persecuted, ill treated or tortured. 22 6.3 The complainant adds that, in its decision on his case of 4 January 2011, the Federal Office of Migration accepted the fact that he had had problems with the authorities and had been required to report to the local police station because of his conviction in the 1980s and 1990s for assisting the PKK. The State part y is therefore being inconsistent when it maintains that the complainant is not wanted by the police and does not have a police record, and that he could settle in another province. Having been arrested several times for offences against the unity of the S tate, he must have a police and a criminal record, which would prevent him from moving to another province. However, as those records are confidential documents, the Swiss Embassy in Ankara understandably did not have access to such information. 6.4 The criteria applied by the Committee, such as the scale of political activities in support of the PKK, past prosecutions, and the question of whether the complainant has been tortured in the past, 23 are all met in the present case. The complainant has been arrested and tortured in the past, and remains a troublesome person for the Turkish authorities. Contrary to the State party’s argument that any risks he might have faced belonged to the past, the complainant asserts that when he filed his asylum application in 2003, less than eight years had passed since his last arrest in the 1990s. Furthermore, as he was arrested and released on numerous occasions, and the periods of detention coincided with periods of varying degrees of violent repression, the possibility of his being arrested again if returned cannot be ruled out. 6.5 Lastly, the complainant reiterates that he has been politically active and has played an important part in the establishment of Kurdish parties (and was imprisoned for this reason) and that members of his family in Switzerland and Turkey are politically active, including his brother, who sought refuge in Switzerland and has been involved in significant political activity supporting the PKK/ERNK (National Liberation Front of Kurdistan) in Switzerland. For all these reasons, the complainant maintains that he faces a present risk to his life if forcibly returned to Turkey. Additional submissions by the complainant 7.1 On 8 July 2014, the complainant submitted a new medical certificate issued by the consultation centre for victims of war and torture of Geneva University Hospitals, dated 22 May 2014, which attests to the existence of musculoskeletal impairments consistent with systematic violence. According to the complainant, this attestation corroborates the facts previously established in others, i.e. that he has indeed been subjected to torture and that he remains psychologically vulnerable. Forcing him to return would thus be akin to psychological violence, given his state of health. __________________ 22 23 GE. 15-11119 Judgement D-6684/2011 dated 18 April 2013. See Aytulun Güclü v. Sweden, paragraphs 7.6 and 7.7. 9/12