The High Court has refused an applicant leave to seek judicial review of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s decision rejecting his appeal against a recommendation that he not be declared a refugee.
In a judgment delivered on 11 November 2008, Mr Justice Hedigan said the applicant had not established substantial grounds for arguing that the Tribunal’s decision should be quashed. The ruling decided only whether leave for judicial review should be granted; it did not grant leave or quash the Tribunal decision.
The applicant, a Croatian national of Serbian ethnicity, said he feared persecution if returned to Croatia. He described being shot at in his family home in Vukovar in 1997 and being detained and beaten by police there in 1998. The judgment records that he later travelled to Ireland and applied for asylum in May 2003. The Refugee Appeals Tribunal rejected his appeal in July 2006, concluding that he did not have a well-founded fear of persecution if returned.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal had made factual errors about whether he had Serbian citizenship and refugee status, and about whether he refused to identify people with whom he had served. He also argued that it had trivialised his past mistreatment, failed to assess future risk in light of it, and inadequately considered country of origin information.
The judge accepted that the Tribunal had erred about the applicant’s citizenship and refugee status. However, he said those mistakes had not affected its assessment: the Tribunal made no adverse credibility finding, and its decision was based on the applicant’s claim of risk because of his Serbian ethnicity. The judge considered the account of refusing to identify former fellow soldiers consistent with the evidence before the Tribunal.
The court also rejected the arguments that past persecution had been trivialised or overlooked. Reading the Tribunal’s decision as a whole, the judge said it had addressed the shooting and detention, accepted the applicant’s experiences, and considered his subjective fear alongside country information indicating improvements in Croatia. The judge found the Tribunal’s assessment of that information fair and reasonable, including its consideration of ethnic bias in prosecutions and the limited number of new indictments against Serbs cited in the material.
The court therefore refused leave, finding no substantial grounds to challenge the Tribunal’s decision.