The High Court dismissed a judicial review challenge to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s rejection of an asylum appeal by an anonymised applicant from Mozambique.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys ruled on 8 March 2018 that the tribunal’s decision was supported by its assessment of the applicant’s credibility. The court said the tribunal member had heard the applicant and was best placed to assess his account. The order dismissed the application; it did not grant asylum or reconsider the asylum claim on its merits.
The applicant had claimed that RENAMO insurgents kidnapped and raped him, damaged his jaw and killed his father. The Refugee Applications Commissioner rejected his asylum claim in 2014. The tribunal rejected his appeal after an oral hearing in September 2016.
In the judicial review, the applicant argued that the tribunal had given inadequate weight to medico-legal material, failed to determine whether his father’s death certificate was authentic or make further inquiries about it, and failed to consider whether he faced risk from an imputed political opinion.
The judge found that the tribunal had considered the reports and correspondence. He said the tribunal was entitled to assess them alongside the broader credibility issues. The court noted that the psychiatric report referred to traumatic events “as he describes them”, while the dental report could not say with certainty how the reported injuries occurred. The judge said the medical material did not require the tribunal to accept the applicant’s account.
The tribunal had not expressly declared the death certificate inauthentic. The judge said it had treated the document as insufficient to overcome the credibility concerns. He also rejected the argument that the tribunal had a duty to investigate the document’s origins in Mozambique.
On imputed political opinion, the judge found that the tribunal had addressed the issue and accepted the Commissioner’s view that the applicant’s alleged low-level activities were unwilling, so political opinion would not be attributed to him. The court concluded that the tribunal’s findings were open to it on the evidence and dismissed the judicial review.