The High Court quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting a Pakistani man’s appeal for refugee status, finding deficiencies in the Tribunal’s assessment of documents, his account of events and country information. The case was sent back for consideration by a different Tribunal member.
In a judgment delivered on 2 October 2014, Mr Justice Barr also extended time for the man’s judicial review proceedings to 20 January 2010. He allowed the applicant’s grounding affidavit to remain in evidence, rejecting the respondents’ objection that it lacked an Urdu translation. The court said there was no evidence that the applicant did not understand English sufficiently to swear it.
The applicant said he had led a Shia Muslim procession in Faisalabad on 9 January 2009, which was attacked by members of an opposing group. He said four attackers were shot dead by people in the procession and that a criminal complaint was later made against him. He claimed police were seeking him and that he left Pakistan in February 2009 after staying with acquaintances in other cities. These were his account of events, not findings made by the High Court.
The Refugee Appeals Tribunal had rejected his credibility on several grounds. Mr Justice Barr said the Tribunal’s reasoning about the six weeks between the procession and the applicant’s departure was unsound because it gave the impression he had lived openly, without addressing his evidence that he had stayed with a friend’s grandparents in Gujranwala. The judge also said the Tribunal had not specifically dealt with an arrest warrant dated 13 April 2009.
The Tribunal had questioned the timing and genuineness of two versions of a First Information Report and referred to country information about the possibility of fabricated criminal proceedings and newspaper reports. The High Court said the timing discrepancy was a difficulty, but not necessarily fatal, and that the Tribunal had not clearly stated whether it rejected the documents or adequately explained why. It had also failed to investigate the newspaper evidence more closely, the judge said.
The judgment further found that the Tribunal had not explicitly assessed the applicant’s claim that he could face capital punishment if convicted, or given a balanced explanation of its treatment of conflicting country information about corruption and the fairness of courts in Pakistan. The court did uphold one adverse finding: it said the Tribunal was entitled to conclude that there was no evidence members of the opposing sect were looking for the applicant or would retaliate against him.
The order quashed the Tribunal’s decision of 3 December 2009 and referred the matter back to a different Tribunal member. The High Court did not itself decide whether the applicant qualified for refugee status.