The High Court has refused a Sri Lankan man’s application to quash the rejection of his international protection appeal, finding that he had not established material errors in the Tribunal’s credibility assessment.
In a judgment delivered on 25 February 2022, Mr Justice Cian Ferriter said the International Protection Appeals Tribunal had grounds to reject the man’s account. The judicial review concerned the Tribunal’s 29 January 2021 decision affirming that he should receive neither refugee status nor subsidiary protection. The court refused the relief sought; it did not decide the underlying protection claim afresh.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as YD, said he feared persecution and serious harm if returned to Sri Lanka. He maintained that he had been arrested and detained in 2008 as a suspect in a bombing, released on bail, and later remained of interest to police. He said he travelled to Saudi Arabia, returned to Sri Lanka in 2014, and eventually left for Ireland. These were his claims, not findings made by the High Court.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal had wrongly treated him as saying he had been charged with the bombing and had relied on inconsistencies that arose from that mistake. The respondents maintained that the Tribunal could rely on what its decision recorded of his evidence, including statements that he had been charged.
Justice Ferriter found inconsistencies in the recorded account, including whether politicians or a court secured the applicant’s release on bail, and whether he had been charged. The judgment noted there was no transcript or audio recording of the Tribunal hearing, and no affidavit asserting that the Tribunal had misrecorded the evidence. The court said it could not gainsay the Tribunal’s account in those circumstances.
The judge also considered the applicant’s challenges to the Tribunal’s assessment of his travel to and return from Saudi Arabia, his account of police contact after his return, and his move with his family to a camp in Jaffna. He found no basis to intervene on most of those points. The Tribunal may not have fully understood a nuance in the applicant’s evidence about the claimed protection of a government minister, the judge said, but any error on that issue was not material to the overall credibility assessment given the other concerns identified.
The judgment also referred to inconsistencies the Tribunal identified in a document said to be a charge sheet and difficulties with a supporting letter attributed to a Sri Lankan member of parliament. The High Court concluded that the Tribunal had multiple grounds for its adverse credibility findings and refused the applicant’s claims for relief.