Convention if he were to be returned to that country. Moreover, owing to the complainant’s post-traumatic stress disorder, he would be subject to severe emotional trauma upon return to India without the possibility of obtaining appropriate medical treatment, which in itself would constitute inhuman and degrading treatment, in violation of article 16 of the Convention. 3.2Counsel also claims that the complainant has exhausted all domestic remedies. He further submits that remedies in the Canadian immigration review scheme are ineffective since immigration officers are not trained in human rights or in legal matters, in most cases fail to take into account the jurisprudence of the Immigration and Refugee Board and of the Federal Court or realistically to assess the situation in the refugee claimants’ country of origin, are frequently exposed to pressure to produce high deportation numbers and generally show mistrust towards allegations made by refugee claimants. State party’s observations on admissibility and merits 4.1On 8 November 2001, the State party submitted its observations on the admissibility and, subsidiarily, on the merits of the complaint. 4.2The State party concedes that the complainant has exhausted all available domestic remedies. However, the State party submits that the complaint is inadmissible because the evidence presented by him is insufficient to establish a prima facie violation of the Convention. 4.3With regard to article 3 of the Convention, the State party submits that, pursuant to general comment No. 1, this provision places the burden upon the complainant to establish that he would be at risk of being tortured if returned to India. According to the State party, the complainant’s behaviour after his departure from India in 1992 is inconsistent with his alleged fear of torture, as reflected by his failure to apply for refugee status in the United States while he was living in that country, his failure to report for the examination of his first refugee claim by the Canadian authorities on 17 August 1993, as well as the renewal of his Indian passport in New York in 1993 which, in the State party’s view, constitutes further evidence that the complainant does not fear Indian authorities and that he was not and is not being sought by them.e Furthermore, the State party questions the credibility of the complainant because of the dubious authenticity of the arrest warrant against him which had been issued two years after his departure from India, was not supplied to the Canadian authorities before December 1996, was typewritten lacking an official letterhead, and belonged to the type of documents which could be easily forged or obtained for a small fee in India. 4.4The State party also submits that the medical reports supplied by the complainant merely confirm the existence of past injuries without providing evidence of the cause of these injuries. Doubts are also raised by the State party with regard to the psychiatric report diagnosing post traumatic stress disorder which the complainant had never mentioned prior to 1999. The State party concludes that, even if these reports corroborated the complainant’s allegation that he had been tortured in the past, this did not occur in the recent past, the decisive issue being whether a risk of torture continued to exist. With reference to the Committee’s jurisprudence,f the State party submits that even though past torture is an element to be considered when examining claims under article 3, the aim of the Committee’s examination is to find whether the complainant would currently run a risk of torture, if returned to the country of origin. 4.5Based on several reports on the human rights situation in India and, in particular, in the Punjab, the State party submits that there is no consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights in Punjab and that the situation in that province has improved over the past years as shown by the substantial decrease of both Sikh militarism as well as the targeting of Sikhs by the police. The State party doubts that the complainant was ever personally targeted by the police, suggesting that his alleged detention formed part of a past practice of false arrest by the Punjabi police with a view of obtaining a bribe. The State party further argues that only known Sikh militants or activists may still be considered at risk of being maltreated; the complainant, however, had never been a member of any political party or social movement.g Taking into account that the Committee had even rejected an article 3 claim by a high-profile Sikh militant who had been involved in the hijacking of an Indian Airlines airplane in 1981,h the State party finds that torture cannot, in the circumstances of the present case, be considered a foreseeable and necessary consequence of the complainant’s return to India. 4.6With regard to the alleged violation of article 16 of the Convention, the State party argues that this provision does not apply to the complainant’s situation because it follows from the travaux préparatoires of the Convention that issues of deportation or expulsion are exhaustively dealt with by article 3. The State party also submits that, according to the Committee’s jurisprudence, “aggravation of the author’s state of health possibly caused by […] deportation would not amount to the type of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment envisaged by article 16 of the Convention, attributable to the State party”.i Since the inability of a State to provide the best medical care does not, in the view of the State party, constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, the return of the complainant to India cannot constitute such treatment either, even if his claim regarding the lack of appropriate medical treatment in India were substantiated. 4.7In the alternative, if the complaint should be declared admissible, the State party requests the Committee to dismiss it on the merits, based on the same reasons as set out above. 4.8With respect to the risk assessment by the Canadian immigration authorities, the State party submits that immigration officers are specially trained to assess the situation in the country of origin of refugee claimants and to apply domestic Canadian as well as human rights law including the Convention against Torture. The State party considers the remedy of judicial review an adequate safeguard for the immigration officers’ “relative lack of independence”. 4.9Lastly, the State party argues that the Committee should not substitute its own finding on whether there were substantial grounds for believing that the complainant would be at risk of being tortured if returned to India, since the national proceedings before the immigration and Refugee Board, as well as the Federal Court, do not disclose a manifest error or unreasonableness or any other irregularity, the evaluation of facts and evidence being a matter reserved to the national courts.