CAT/C/71/D/866/2018
Force in Switzerland. She is the organization’s representative in the Canton of Lucerne and
the founder of the women’s activist group within the Task Force. She is also a member of the
Association des Éthiopiens en Suisse. The complainant presents photos and links to online
videos as evidence of her participation in opposition meetings, demonstrations and forums in
Switzerland, of her acquaintance with prominent Ethiopian opposition leaders and human
rights activists and of her interactions with Ethiopian Satellite Television & Radio journalists.
The complainant claims that her brother has been imprisoned in Ethiopia since September
2016, likely in relation to her “high political profile”.
2.2
On 4 September 2014, the complainant lodged an asylum application with the State
party. On 17 September 2014 and 2 October 2014, she was interviewed by the Federal Office
for Migration (which became the State Secretariat for Migration on 1 January 2015). She
declared that in March 2010, she had joined Ginbot 7 in Ethiopia. She had received the party’s
flyers in her sister’s shop and acted as an intermediary for further transmitting them. In
around May–June 2011, she had come across her boyfriend’s wallet and realized that he was
an intelligence agent. They had known each other since around 2006–2007 and had lived
together since around October–November 2010 but, until that day, she had believed he was
a businessman. They had had a fight and she had made a decision to gradually end the
relationship. In the meantime, the boyfriend had begun spying on her. A month and a half
later, he had come to her sister’s shop on a day the complainant had received Ginbot 7 flyers.
When she had gone to the bathroom, he had found the flyers on the store counter. Back at
home, he had forbidden her to go out, had beaten her, had threatened her with death and
imprisonment and had tried to convince her to disclose the names of her collaborators. Two
days later, when he had left town for work, she had escaped. In August 2011, she had left for
Dubai. Her brother had learned from a friend who was a policeman that an arrest warrant had
been issued against her. Her brother had managed to obtain a copy of the warrant and send a
photo of it to the complainant’s mobile telephone. The complainant’s ex-boyfriend had
threatened her family, and her brother had been imprisoned in late 2013–early 2014 for three
months. The complainant had stated that her life had been in danger in Dubai because her exboyfriend still worked for the secret services and because the owner of the restaurant where
she had worked had forbidden her to leave home and had repeatedly raped her. In 2012, she
had renewed her passport through the Ethiopian embassy in Dubai. On 2 July 2014, she had
taken a plane to Geneva, accompanied by a smuggler who had helped her to obtain a
Schengen visa. On 3 July 2014, she had gone to France and stayed for 25 days in an
unidentified location. She had then arrived in Calais, where she had stayed for another month,
expecting to go to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. She had then
realized that the smuggler who had brought her to Geneva had not given her passport to
smugglers in France. She had illegally re-entered Switzerland and had applied for asylum.
2.3
On 17 November 2014, the Federal Office for Migration rejected the complainant’s
asylum request due to her failure to provide an identity document and the arrest warrant
allegedly in her brother’s possession,1 and due to lack of credibility of her application. The
Office considered it implausible that she would go to the bathroom and leave Ginbot 7 flyers
within easy reach of her boyfriend, whom she knew to be an intelligence officer. The Office
considered equally implausible that, after discovering the flyers and threatening her with
death, her boyfriend would leave town and allow her to escape. On 16 December 2014, the
complainant appealed to the Federal Administrative Court, providing an identity document,
an original copy of the arrest warrant and documents attesting to her membership in Ginbot
7. On 27 April 2015, the Court rejected her appeal, concluding that her declarations lacked
credibility, and were partly incoherent and “stereotypical”. In particular, the Court found
implausible that after being threatened by her boyfriend, she had taken the risk of leaving
Ethiopia from an airport using her own passport and had later renewed the passport through
the Ethiopian embassy. The Court considered that the arrest warrant did not have a
determinant probative value in view of important non-credible elements in the complainant’s
statements. It noted that the complainant’s initial reluctance to produce this document and
the fact that she had produced the original after claiming that her brother had only obtained
1
2
The complainant claimed that she no longer had the mobile telephone with the photo of the warrant
and that her brother had been waiting for someone to travel to Switzerland in order to send her the
documents, to avoid high postal fees.