than to a real fear of persecution.
4.5 With regard to the author's divorce, the State party wonders why it took place only three years
after the author's departure and why it was not his wife who applied for it if the aim of the divorce
was purely, according to the author's statements, to avoid her continued persecution. The State party
believes the reasons for the divorce have more to do with the irreparable breakdown of the marriage,
as mentioned on the separation certificate. This impression is confirmed by the author's request for
publication of a notice of intent to marry, submitted in February 1999 and withdrawn a few weeks
later.
4.6 The State party recalls the Committee's general comment on the implementation of article 3 of
the Convention, according to which the risk of torture "must be assessed on grounds that go beyond
mere theory or suspicion", even though "the risk does not have to meet the test of being highly
probable". In the light of the above, the State party does not consider that the author has
demonstrated that the risk of "deliberate persecution" is highly probable. Indeed, according to
information provided by the Swiss embassy in Ankara, there is no political file on the author or any
file in which it is stated that he has committed a crime under ordinary law; neither the local nor the
national police or gendarmerie are looking for him and there are no restrictions at all on his use of
a passport. Someone from his village also confirmed that the author had left over 10 years earlier
and had settled in Istanbul before leaving for Switzerland.
4.7 On the question of the allegations of torture and ill-treatment suffered by the author in the past,
the State party first draws attention to the factors to be taken into account according to the general
comment on the implementation of article 3 of the Convention. On the basis of this, it then refers
to the observations made by the Swiss authorities on the author's application for asylum and notes
that the author produced two letters from a lawyer explaining his problems which contained
numerous spelling and syntactical mistakes and which had been drafted in a very unprofessional
way. The author argues that the lawyer was a Kurd and did not know Turkish very well, but the State
party points out that Turkish is the official language in Turkey, that the laws are written in Turkish
and that lawyers' training is given in Turkish. It is therefore highly unlikely that a lawyer would not
know Turkish well. The State party also points out that the author makes no further mention of an
accommodation document from the Muthar of Bazlama and a forged letter from the Karakocan
public prosecutor, and this would suggest that the author no longer contests the observations by the
Swiss authorities in this regard. The State party then states that no probative value can be attached
to the medical report that is supposed to prove that acts of torture took place. For one thing, the
report asserts that the "treatment" lasted from 23 May to 3 June 1985, whereas the author has said
he was released on 29 June 1985; for another, the author's description of the torture he underwent including blows, burns, paralysis of two fingers and electric shocks to the genitals - does not
correspond to what is described in the medical report. Lastly, the State party draws attention to the
contradictory statements in which the author claimed on one occasion that, after seven days in
detention, he had been taken before a prosecutor who released him after his family paid a sum of
money to an "Oberleutnant" (lieutenant-colonel) and, on another occasion, that he had never been
taken before a prosecutor and that his uncle had paid a security to either a judge, a prosecutor, or a
"Hauptmann" (captain) or an "Oberst" (colonel).
4.8 The State party also considers that, even if the author was indeed tortured, there is no satisfactory