CAT/C/71/D/885/2018
summoned by a court in connection with the matter. Moreover, the judgment in question,
namely the enforcement order, as the document is entitled, refers to a previous judgment and
a related communication from the Court. Surprisingly, the order’s reference number is not
indicated. In any event, given that the document refers to a previous judgment, there is reason
to believe that the case in question had already been dealt with by the Iranian authorities and
that the procedure must have taken place while the ordinary asylum procedure was under
way in Switzerland. It is therefore impossible to understand why the complainant did not
mention this procedure at his hearing on 6 April 2016.
4.9
There are also questions surrounding the authenticity of the documents. Firstly,
according to the assessment of the State Secretariat for Migration, their form differs from that
of comparable documents. Secondly, their wording does not correspond to the legal language
of other judgments. In particular, the articles of the laws corresponding to the offences
mentioned are not cited. With regard to the content, several elements are meaningless. It is
thus apparent from the judgment in question that the complainant would be criminally
prosecuted and that his property would be seized. At the end of the document, the
complainant is asked to comply with the instructions contained in the judgment within 10
days of the date of issuance. However, it is unclear what this order relates to. If it related to
the earlier judgment already mentioned, which lacks a reference number, that would usually
be indicated.
4.10 With regard to the arguments presented by the complainant in his communication
concerning criminal proceedings allegedly under way against him, they are simply
allegations and have not been substantiated. Moreover, when the complainant claims that a
previous judgment may have been handed down or that one might be handed down in the
future, he contradicts the allegations he himself made in his appeal against the decision of
the State Secretariat for Migration dated 11 January 2018, when he claimed that the reference
to another judgment was based on a translation error and that the judgment in fact referred to
itself. In addition, no subsequent judgments have been placed on file.
4.11 In the light of the foregoing, the State party is of the view that the complainant’s
claims are not plausible and that he has failed to demonstrate that he would be at risk of
treatment prohibited by the Convention if returned to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Complainant’s comments on the State party’s submission
5.1
On 27 May 2019, the complainant submitted his comments on the State party’s
observations. He considers that the State party has simply repeated and summarized the
arguments used by the State Secretariat for Migration to reject his application for asylum,
without addressing the explanations he provided in his communication to the Committee. He
claims that on the essential points, the explanations he gave during the asylum procedure
were coherent, plausible and consistent. At no time did the Swiss authorities show any
willingness to examine impartially the risks facing him. On the contrary, they sought to find
alleged contradictions in his numerous statements or to dismiss them perfunctorily as
implausible, with the manifestly biased intention of denying him refugee status.
5.2
As an example, the State party’s claim that the complainant has not been able to
explain why his girlfriend’s highly religious family allowed him to have a relationship with
her outside marriage for four years illustrates this approach. The complainant had already
explained in his submission of 18 April 2016 that, although he had known his girlfriend for
four years, their contact had been limited to sporadic phone calls and that their relationship
only became intimate during a trip in August and September 2015. As his girlfriend’s father
had refused his marriage proposal, the pair became intimate during the trip, which the father,
a religious fanatic, had forbidden them to take. At no time did the complainant claim to have
had an intimate relationship with his girlfriend for four years. Although in the Western
cultural context the word “relationship” between two people implies sexual intercourse, this
is certainly not the case in the Iranian cultural context.
5.3
It is therefore hardly surprising that the State party is not prepared to attach any
importance to the court documents submitted. On the contrary, the documents and the
conclusions that can be drawn from them have on the whole been discredited and deemed
mere allegations. Although the judgment submitted contains little concrete information, the
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GE.21-12735