The High Court has dismissed a Nigerian man’s application to overturn the International Protection Appeals Tribunal’s rejection of his protection appeal. The court held that the tribunal’s credibility assessment was rational and that no further assessment of future risk was required on the facts it accepted.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as D.U. (Nigeria), sought certiorari of the tribunal’s decision. He said he was bisexual and had faced an attempt to force him to join a cult. At an asylum interview in January 2017, he said a cult targeted him because his father owned a clothes shop, but did not mention his claimed bisexuality. He raised his sexual orientation at a later interview in March 2017.
The International Protection Office refused his application in May 2017, rejecting the credibility of his account. It also rejected a risk under section 50 of the International Protection Act 2015 in its leave-to-remain decision. The tribunal rejected his appeal in October 2017.
The judicial review challenge argued that the tribunal’s credibility assessment had shortcomings, that one finding was unclear, and that it had failed to consider future harm arising from the applicant’s claimed sexual orientation.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys said the tribunal member, who had heard and seen the applicant, had made a sufficiently reasoned and rational decision. While some sentences might not have been phrased in the best way, that did not establish an entitlement to have the decision quashed. The judge said the weight given to evidence and the significance of omissions were matters for the tribunal decision-maker.
The court also rejected the claim that the tribunal’s acceptance that the applicant was a Nigerian national was unclear. The judge said that finding indicated that the other material allegations were not accepted, which the tribunal had stated elsewhere in its decision.
On future risk, the judge said the duty to assess possible future harm must rest on elements of an applicant’s account that the tribunal accepts as possibly true. Since the tribunal did not accept the claimed sexual orientation, no assessment of future risk based on that allegation was required. The court noted that future risk had been considered under the subsidiary protection heading, but said no further consideration was required in the absence of accepted facts from which future harm could plausibly arise.
The application was dismissed. The ruling did not overturn the tribunal’s decision.