CCPR/C/117/D/2124/2011 Annex V Individual opinion of Committee members Anja SeibertFohr, Yuji Iwasawa and Konstantine Vardzelashvili 1. While we agree with the majority of the Committee that we cannot find a violation of the author’s rights under the Covenant in the present case, we are unable to agree, with respect to the admissibility of the communication. We would have found the communication inadmissible in the first place for the following reasons. 2. The authors of the Communication claim to be victims of a violation of their Covenant rights, inter alia because the authorities did not convict Mr. Wilders for hate speech. This claim is inadmissible rationae materiae. According to the long-established jurisprudence of the Committee, the Covenant does not provide a right for individuals to require that the State criminally prosecute and punish a third party. a Neither does article 20 of the Covenant provide such a right nor can it be claimed under articles 14, 17, 26, 27 or 2 (3). This claim of the authors is therefore incompatible with the provisions of the Covenant and inadmissible under article 3 of the Optional Protocol. 3. The authors effectively claim also that the State party has insufficiently protected them from threats to their physical integrity, from discrimination or advocacy of hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence. However, we consider that they have not sufficiently substantiated that the State party did not provide them with adequate protection in the present case. According to Dutch legislation, the authors could have brought a civil action against Mr. Wilders pursuant to article 6:162 of the Civil Code. They have declined to take this path; instead, they decided to resort exclusively to criminal proceedings by joining criminal proceedings against Mr. Wilders as an aggrieved party and claiming compensation. According to the State party’s uncontested submission, a successful civil action before a civil court pursuant to article 6:162 of the Civil Code would have enabled the authors to ask for a ban of future abusive statements or to request a declaratory decision that Mr. Wilder’s statements were unlawful. This avenue is still available. There is no reason to assume that these proceedings would not offer them the protection required under the Covenant. b Article 20 of the Covenant which requires States parties to prohibit by law any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, does not strictly require the imposition of criminal penalties. Without having tried to seek protection in civil proceedings which were available to them, the authors cannot claim their inadequacy just on the basis that they are civil in nature. Thus, in the circumstances of the case, the authors have failed to demonstrate that the State party gave insufficient protection to the authors and that their right to protection under the Covenant was effectively impaired. For these reasons, this part of the author’s communication has been insufficiently substantiated for the purposes of admissibility and is inadmissible under article 2 of the Optional Protocol. a b 28 Communication No. 563/1993, Bautista de Arellana v. Colombia, Views adopted on 27 October 1995, paragraph 8.6; Communication No. 1885/2009, Horvath v. Australia, Views adopted on 27 March 2014, para. 8.2. In order to determine the protection owed to the authors under the Covenant, it would be necessary to examine furthermore the victim status of the authors. But this issue can be left open here because the authors have declined to resort to the remedies available to them under domestic law in the first place.