The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting a Nigerian man’s asylum appeal, finding that the tribunal did not adequately explain why it considered internal relocation within Nigeria available to him.
The judicial review concerned the tribunal’s decision of 17 April 2008. The applicant said he feared persecution after a dispute over a plantation boundary that he had adjudicated as his village’s high chief. He claimed his home was attacked and burned, his wife died in the fire, and he left his daughter with an aunt before travelling to Ireland in January 2008.
A January 2008 report recommending refusal of asylum cited doubts about his account, his failure to seek police protection, and the view that he could live safely elsewhere in Nigeria. The tribunal appeal decision relied explicitly on internal relocation, reasoning that the dispute concerned his village and that he could have remained in Lagos or moved elsewhere. It referred to Lagos’s population and the applicant’s education and business experience.
On appeal, the applicant had challenged relocation and cited country information describing the strength of social networks in Nigeria and the difficulty of avoiding detection after falling out with one’s community. The High Court said the tribunal’s response—that there was “little to support him” in the country information—did not make clear how it had assessed that material. The court said the decision’s reasoning could not be supplied by a hypothesis about what the tribunal member might have thought.
The court held that the tribunal had to address the specific challenge to its relocation finding and explain its reasoning. It found the first of the three grounds for which leave had been granted was made out, and ordered certiorari quashing the tribunal’s decision.
The court rejected the other two grounds. It said the tribunal decision contained no explicit finding that the applicant was not credible, and that the state-protection ground did not need to be addressed because the tribunal had relied on relocation. Those conclusions were not the basis for quashing the decision.
The respondents had also argued that the judicial review had become moot after the applicant received temporary permission to remain in Ireland until 28 November 2014, following later family circumstances. The court rejected that objection: the temporary permission did not prevent him from pursuing the challenge to the asylum decision. The judgment quashed the tribunal decision; it did not grant asylum or determine the applicant’s refugee status.