CCPR/C/131/D/3069/2017 Annex I Joint opinion of Committee members Vasilka Sancin and Photini Pazartzis (dissenting) 1. We respectfully disagree with the majority of the Committee in finding that the author’s removal to Afghanistan would, if implemented, be a violation by the State party of his rights under articles 6 and 7 of the Covenant. 2. In paragraph 9.3, the Committee recalls that “it is generally for the organs of the States parties to the Covenant to review and evaluate facts and evidence in order to determine whether such a risk exists, unless it can be established that the evaluation was clearly arbitrary or amounted to a manifest error or denial of justice”. This legal standard is consistently reflected throughout the Committee’s jurisprudence1 and denotes a threshold that should not be displaced in the absence of compelling facts that clearly demonstrate arbitrariness or a manifest error or a denial of justice. 3. In para. 9.9, the Committee considers that “regardless of the motive of abuse, the alleged abuse and its trauma in combination with the vulnerability of the author stemming both from his youth and his migration history could represent a serious risk to the author’s health and psychological and physical development” which would require an “in-depth examination of the abusive attitude of the parents”. 4. In our view the author, no longer a minor, provided no convincing evidence that the State party had failed to properly assess whether he would be facing a real risk of irreparable harm such as that contemplated by articles 6 and 7 of the Covenant, if returned to Afghanistan. The Swedish authorities did assess the threatening letter allegedly written by the author’s father, but the Migration Board found “it could not have evidential value as it was a simple handwritten message with no indication of when, how, from whom, or why the author had received it. The translation service used by the Migration Board noted that the letter could not be properly translated, as it was incomprehensible. The information which the author himself has provided about the content of the document is scarce, unclear and vaguely formulated. The Migration Board, therefore, concluded that there were reasons to believe that the author’s parents were deliberately hiding so that the author would be once again considered and treated as an unaccompanied minor.” (para. 2.10). 5. In the absence of any other substantiated evidence of a serious and personal risk the author would be exposed to if returned to Afghanistan, and given that there exists ambiguity as to the whereabouts of the author’s parents (in para. 9.10 that is recognized that by the indication that the parents may have returned to Afghanistan), we cannot conclude that the decision of the Swedish authorities to refuse the author’s asylum request was clearly arbitrary or amounted to a manifest error or denial of justice that would entail a violation of articles 6 and 7 of the Covenant. 1 14 A.S.M. and R.A.H. v. Denmark (CCPR/C/113/D/2378/2014), paras. 8.3 and 8.6; E.U.R. v. Denmark (CCPR/C/117/D/2469/2014), para. 9.7, citing numerous earlier communications. See also Ashby v. Trinidad and Tobago (CCPR/C/74/D/580/1994), para. 10.3.