Ke Chun Rong was a Falun Gong leader in his village when the spiritual movement was banned in China in 1999. Thousands of practitioners were gaoled, interned or committed to psychiatric hospitals. When Mr Ke organised a protest, he was detained for 16 days and tortured to extract the names of other Falun Gong practitioners. Mr Ke escaped to Australia where he applied for asylum. Australia did ‘not dispute that Falun Gong practitioners in China have been subjected to torture’, but did not believe Mr Ke was a Falun Gong practitioner or that he was ‘detained or mistreated’ as he claimed. The Committee Against Torture found that Australia had ‘failed to duly verify the complainant’s allegations and evidence through … effective, independent and impartial review’, and that Australia would breach article 3 if it deported Mr Ke to China. Mr Ke has since been allowed to apply for a visa under Australia’s complementary protection provisions, which protect people facing breaches of CAT and the ICCPR that fall outside the Refugee Convention.

Mr Dewage was a union organiser and active member of an opposition party in Sri Lanka. He suffered threats, harassment and assault from members of governing and rival parties and was also ill-treated by members of the LTTE. After he escaped to Australia, ‘thugs’ broke into his house and his mother’s house looking for him, injuring his mother and threatening to kill his family. His wife fled and has not been heard from since.

Australia rejected Mr Dewage’s refugee claim and detained him pending deportation. He petitioned CAT, which issued interim views requesting he not be deported while it considered his communication. The Committee concluded that Mr Dewage faced a ‘foreseeable, real and personal risk of being subjected to torture by Government officials if returned to Sri Lanka’ and that Australia must therefore ‘refrain from forcibly returning [him] to Sri Lanka or to any other country where he runs a real risk of being expelled or returned to Sri Lanka.’