CAT/C/35/D/231/2003 Page 5 in the absence of any other evidence such as an indictment, a judgment or a decision to discontinue criminal proceedings against him. In a separate decision, the BFF also rejected the second and third complainants’ asylum claim, based on a) inconsistencies between the statement s of the second complainant and her husband about the date of the latter’s desertion from the army and about the time when both spouses lost contact; b) the fact that desertions from the Sri Lankan army were unlikely to lead to persecution of family members; and c) the fact that the second complainant left Sri Lanka before her husband, although he was at the center of the authorities’ attention. The BFF did not consider that the complainants’ brother’s death in 1992 would still give rise to any persecution of the surviving family members. It ordered the complainants’ removal from Switzerland, arguing that their Sinhalese ethnicity and the existence of an internal flight alternative in Sri Lanka minimized any risk of illtreatment on return. 2.7 On 28 August 2000, the Asylum Appeals Board (ARK) dismissed the first complainant’s appeal against the decision of the BFF. It rejected new evidence submitted by the first complainant (copy and translation of a document issued by Mahara prisons, confirming that he had been detained from 4 July to 22 December 1995; summons for a High Court hearing on 22 October 1998; and two warrants dated 9 December 1998 and 1 July 1999 with translations), arguing that, in the absence of the original, the copy of the confirmation from Mahara prisons only had very limited evidentiary value, that it was unusual for such a document to be signed by a prison warden, that the file reference on the summons and on the warrant dated 9 December bears no apparent link to the reference number of the proceedings, and that his address on both warrants referred to the town where he had lived prior to 1993, although the authorities must have known that he had moved to Akkuressa, where he was arrested in June 1995. The ARK considered that several inconsistencies undermined the credibility of the first complainant’s claims: a) the contradiction between his initial statement before the immigration authorities that his mother had provided his bail and his statement during ARK proceedings that he would submit copies of recent summons of his two bailors; b) the fact that there was no need for the Sri Lankan authorities to arrest him under the pretext of a common criminal offense, if they suspected him of hiding his brother-in- law, given that sheltering a deserter would have been a sufficient basis for arrest under Sri Lankan law; and c) the fact that he did not leave Sri Lanka before March 1997, although he claims that since January 1996, he had feared to be re-arrested. 2.8 On 28 August 2000, the ARK also dismissed the second and third complainants’ appeal, based on the same inconsistencies as the ones which had been identified by the BFF. 2.9 On 19 December 2002, the ARK dismissed the first complaint’s extraordinary appeal. It rejected a certified copy dated 10 July 2000 of his indictment and the trial transcript of the High Court of Colombo as out of time, finding that this evidence should have been introduced during the appeal proceedings, given that the first complainant had sufficient time to obtain the document from his lawyer in Colombo. The new evidence would, in any event, not give rise to a non-refoulement claim, in the absence of a credible claim that the first complainant’s indictment for robbery was intended to punish him for his brother-in- law’s army desertion. Only in exceptional cases involving much more serious offenses than desertion were family members held