CCPR/C/126/D/2570/2015 SIZO No. 29.22 The fact that a State is party to an international convention on human rights protection does not entail a presumption that the State actually respects those rights. The Italian authorities did not take steps to verify the information provided by the author before the domestic courts in the course of the extradition proceedings. Thus, it contravened the established principle in the Committee’s jurisprudence that, prior to extraditing a person to a country where he or she could face a real risk of being subjected to torture or other inhuman and degrading treatment, a State party to the Covenant is under a duty “to carry out a thorough and individualized risk assessment,” taking into consideration “all relevant facts and circumstances … including the general human rights situation in the country to which the author is [to be] deported or extradited”.23 5.6 Against a background of “continued occurrence of torture and ill-treatment by law enforcement authorities,” as already noted by the Committee, it is more than reasonable to expect that the author would be personally at risk if he was extradited to Ukraine. In order to establish whether such a real risk exists in a given case, the Italian authorities should have taken into due consideration all the information provided by the author, including the many reliable public reports submitted before the domestic courts. Instead, all his claims concerning the serious human rights violations occurring in Ukrainian pretrial detention facilities have been overlooked as irrelevant and/or immaterial to his extradition. For this very reason, the author urges the Committee to find a breach of articles 2, 7 and 10 of the Covenant against Italy for not having met its “obligation to conduct a thorough assessment of the information that was known, or ought to have been known, to the State party’s authorities at the time of the extradition and which is relevant for the determination of the risks associated with the extradition” and for having decided to extradite him in spite of “credible public reports” which underlined the critical human rights situation in the requesting State.24 5.7 The real risk of being subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the case of extradition to Ukraine spreads from “structural shortcomings”. All the information available discloses the existence of a consistent pattern of gross and flagrant violations of the human rights of Ukrainian detainees, on account of the squalid conditions in Ukrainian prisons. In addition, the author, whose extradition is sought to stand trial for a robbery allegedly committed 2000, faces the real risk of being subjected to torture aimed at obtaining his confession. In these circumstances, the author deems himself to be personally at risk of suffering the above-mentioned violations for the very fact of being committed for trial in such a flawed and corrupt legal system. 5.8 Finally, the State party’s statement as to assurances is surprising, given that Italy has often resorted to “diplomatic assurances” in the framework of removal of aliens to countries where there was an alleged risk of ill-treatment for the very purpose of claiming compliance with its obligations under the principle of non refoulement. 25 However, it is not the author’s intention to suggest that diplomatic assurances would have actually protected him against the alleged risk of ill-treatment if had been extradited because the Committee has already pointed out in the case of Alzery v. Sweden that, considering the circumstances prevailing at the material time, such assurances would have been completely insufficient “to eliminate the risk of ill-treatment to a level consistent with the requirements of article 7 of the Covenant”. 26 He seeks to stress that the State party did not even attempt to seek information from the requesting State as to the actual conditions of detention awaiting the author in Ukraine, notwithstanding the existence of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violation of human rights in the Ukrainian prisons and the current state of domestic 22 23 24 25 26 See Pustovoit v. Ukraine (CCPR/C/110/D/1405/2005), para. 11 in relation to paras. 2.6–2.7. See Aarrass v. Spain (CCPR/C/111/D/2008/2010), para. 10.3. The same view is shared by the Committee against Torture: see X v. Kazakhstan (CAT/C/55/D/554/2013 and Corr. 1), para. 12.7, and Tursunov v. Kazakhstan (CAT/C/54/D/538/2013), para. 9.9. See, mutatis mutandis, Valetov v. Kazakhstan, paras. 14.2, 14.3 and 14.6. See European Court of Human Rights, Saadi v. Italy, application No. 37201/06, judgment of 28 February 2008, paras. 52 and 116. See Alzery v. Sweden (CCPR/C/88/D/1416/2005), para. 11.5. Also Committee against Torture, Agiza v. Sweeden (CAT/C/34/D/233/2003), paras. 13.4-13.5. 7