Uitspraak
RECHTBANK DEN HAAG
Uitspraak van de meervoudige kamer van 23 februari 2016
[eiser] ,
de staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie,
Het procesverloop
De beoordeling
.
MOJ & Ors(paragraphs 31-32) suggest that there has been an improvement. Given the high volume of oral and written evidence examined by the Tribunal, the Court considers that its assessment must be accorded great weight. Among other things, the Tribunal concluded that there had been durable change in the sense that the al-Shabaab withdrawal from Mogadishu was complete and there was no real prospect of a re-established presence within the city. The indiscriminate bombardments and military offensives mentioned by the Court in its 2011 judgment in
Sufi and Elmi v. the United Kindomhad been replaced by al-Shabaab attacks against carefully selected targets – politicians, police officers, government officials and those associated with non-governmental and international organisations – that did not include “ordinary civilians” or diaspora returnees. The Tribunal further considered that the areas and establishments at which these attacks were aimed were largely predictable and could be reasonably avoided by the citizens. Moreover, while the statistical information concerning casualty levels was deficient and unreliable, the cessation of confrontational warfare in Mogadishu and the changed type of attacks by al-Shabaab were found to have reduced the level of civilian casualties since 2011. The Tribunal also had regard to the “huge” number of people returning to the city, where new economic opportunities were available.
K.A.B. v. Sweden(cited above, §§ 87-91) is still valid. Thus, there is no indication that the situation is of such a nature as to place everyone who is present in the city at a real risk of treatment contrary to Article 3. The Court must therefore establish whether the applicant’s personal circumstances are such that her return to Mogadishu would contravene that provision.”