The High Court has quashed a decision refusing a Georgian woman’s application for international protection, finding that the International Protection Appeals Tribunal had not shown that it applied the required tests on safe-country status and state protection.
In a judgment delivered on 17 February 2022, Ms Justice Siobhán Phelan directed that the protection application be reconsidered by a differently constituted Tribunal. She also proposed an order for the applicant’s costs, with the amount to be adjudicated if the parties could not agree.
The Tribunal had upheld the International Protection Office’s refusal of refugee and subsidiary protection status. It accepted that the applicant had a well-founded fear of persecution linked to membership of a social group as a victim of domestic or intimate partner abuse. The dispute before the High Court principally concerned whether effective state protection would be available to her in Georgia.
The applicant said she had experienced violence and threats from a former partner, whom she said was a police officer, and that police had responded to her report with only a verbal warning. She also described being raped by a friend of her former partner while pregnant. The Tribunal accepted that she had been a victim of violence, possibly intimate partner violence, but made no finding on the rape claim. It also did not separately address the former partner’s threats to the applicant’s twin children.
The High Court said the Tribunal had not explained whether the applicant had raised serious grounds for treating Georgia as unsafe in her particular circumstances, as required by section 33 of the International Protection Act 2015. The decision also did not show that the Tribunal had considered the section 28(6) presumption arising from its finding of a well-founded fear of persecution, or identified good reasons why the feared harm would not recur.
If serious grounds displace the safe-country designation in an individual case, the court said, the Tribunal must assess state protection under section 31 by considering the relevant statutory requirements, including whether protection is effective and accessible to that applicant. The Tribunal’s reasons did not show how it assessed the applicant’s personal circumstances, her former partner’s position or the conflicting country information.
Justice Phelan stressed that she was not finding that state protection was unavailable or that the Tribunal’s conclusion was irrational. Material before the Tribunal could support its conclusion, depending on how it was assessed. But the court could not supply reasoning the Tribunal had not given.
The court therefore quashed the Tribunal’s decision and ordered the protection application remitted for determination by a different Tribunal. It left the precise terms of the consequential orders open for written submissions over the following 14 days.