The High Court has dismissed a judicial review challenge by a Pakistani protection applicant to the refusal of his subsidiary protection appeal, while extending time for the court proceedings to be brought.
In a judgment delivered on 18 December 2018, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys said the application had been filed about two weeks late. He accepted the explanation for the delay and extended time to the date the proceedings were filed on 9 March 2018. The court had granted leave to bring the case on 12 March.
The applicant said he had problems with the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Islam in Pakistan. He claimed warning letters were delivered to his family home in 2012 and that his father and uncle were killed. Those claims were not accepted in full by the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT), which refused his appeals in January 2018 after a hearing and a detailed assessment of his credibility.
The applicant had travelled to the UK in 2011 on a student visa and did not seek asylum there. The High Court said the tribunal was entitled to treat that failure as undermining his protection claim, noting that the applicant’s own explanation was tactical.
The challenge also argued that the tribunal had failed to give proper weight to documents. The judge said a claim that the authorities should have been directed to authenticate the documents had not been pleaded. He added that neither the International Protection Office nor IPAT was obliged to contact bodies in the applicant’s country of origin to verify documents; doing so could disclose that a protection claim had been made, contrary to confidentiality requirements.
The tribunal had considered the documents and was entitled to find that some had limited value in the context of inconsistencies in the applicant’s account. The judge clarified that the tribunal’s statement that documents could not be verified meant they could not be verified on the information before it.
The court also rejected the challenge to the adverse credibility findings and the assessment of risk from indiscriminate violence. The judge said credibility and evidential weight were matters for the tribunal, which had considered country information and the applicant’s personal circumstances, including that family members had returned to the area.
The court’s role was to review the legality of the decision-making process, rather than rehear the protection claim. It extended time and dismissed the proceedings; it did not itself decide the underlying protection claim.