CCPR/C/114/D/2134/2012 Appendix I Individual opinion by Committee member Yuval Shany (partly concurring and partly dissenting) 1. I agree with the rest of Committee that the authors have substantiated the claim that the State party failed to take the necessary measures to protect Mr. Anzola and Mr. Molina in the period of time that followed their disappearance, and that it has not adequately investigated their disappearance until this very day. Hence, the State party should indeed have been found in breach of its positive obligations under articles 6, 7 and 9 of the Covenant and in breach of its duty to provide an effective remedy under article 2 (para. 3) in conjunction with articles 6, 7 and 9. I do not believe, however, that the authors were able to establish that the State party intentionally removed Mr. Anzola and Mr. Molina from the protection of the law. As a result, I also do not consider that it was shown that article 16 was violated in the circumstances of the case. 2. According to the facts alleged by the authors, Mr. Anzola and Mr. Molina disappeared on 9 March 1995 in or around Puerto Triunfo. On 17 March 1995, their car was found abandoned in the district of Aquitania, San Francisco, in the department of Antioquia. According to an unnamed police officer “in that area, paramilitary groups were stopping people to check their identity and were disappearing persons from outside the region” (Views of the Committee, para. 2.4). There have also been some reports that some disappeared persons were working in a stone quarry controlled by paramilitaries near the town of Doradal, and a friend of Mr. Anzola ’s uncle subsequently claimed that, on 16 June 1995, he had seen Mr. Anzola and Mr. Molina leaving a bank in Bucaramanga, in the department of Santander, in the company of armed men who put them in a car. The authors finally claimed that the “paramilitary groups, with the acquiescence of the 42nd Infantry Battalion of the Fourteenth Brigade, operated on the road from Medellín to Bogotá, along which the disappeared relatives were travelling” (Views of the Committee, para. 2.22). 3. Although the said information may certainly suggest that there is a real possibility that Mr. Anzola and Mr. Molina were forcibly disappeared by paramilitary groups operating with the support and complicity of the State party, nothing in the facts of the case rules out other explanations for the disappearance, as other militant and criminal groups have been operating in the same area, and it is possible that groups such as the fourth front of FARC-EP Magdalena Medio or one of the local drug cartels were responsible for the victims’ disappearance. Significantly, there is no information suggesting that Mr. Anzola and Mr. Molina were persons of interest to the paramilitaries because of any political affiliation, and it looks as if they were forcibly disappeared by a paramilitary group or another group for economic or other reasons or fell victim to a random act of violence. 4. When allegations that Mr. Anzola and Mr. Molina were disappeared by Stateaffiliated paramilitaries had been made by the authors to numerous State authorities, the latter responded that “it cannot be established with sufficient certainty that the alleged enforced disappearance of Mr. Anzola and Mr. Molina was a criminal act perpetrated by illegal armed groups that may have been in the area at the time or that the disappearances were directly linked to the modus operandi of these groups or the operation of a stone quarry controlled by paramilitaries that was allegedly found near the town of Doradal” (Views of the Committee, para. 4.3). Although this assertion is in itself indicative of an inadequate investigation into the disappearances and cannot GE.15-15601 17/20