The High Court has rejected a Zimbabwean man’s challenge to a decision recommending that he receive neither refugee status nor subsidiary protection in Ireland.
In a judgment delivered on 29 November 2022, Ms Justice Siobhán Phelan concluded that the applicant was not entitled to the relief he sought in judicial review proceedings against the International Protection Appeals Tribunal and the Minister for Justice and Equality.
The applicant said his two younger brothers had been taken by men he believed were police because they were gay. He said he later became a target after asking about their whereabouts, and that men left arrest warrants at his family home. He also said he feared harm if returned to Zimbabwe. These were claims made in his protection application, not findings by the High Court.
The tribunal had affirmed the International Protection Officer’s recommendation to refuse protection. It rejected the applicant’s account as not established on the balance of probabilities, citing inconsistencies in his account of how he learned where his brothers had been taken, concerns about the warrants, and the circumstances in which they were allegedly left at the family home. It accepted only that he was from Bulawayo.
The applicant argued that the tribunal had treated the warrants as though he claimed they were genuine, when his case was that they were suspicious and could have been a pretext for pursuing him because he was asking about his brothers. The High Court accepted that this was the applicant’s case and said the tribunal’s decision did not reflect that part of his account. However, it found the tribunal had rejected the warrants as unreliable evidence, rather than treating their apparent lack of authenticity as proof that the applicant was not credible. It was also open to the tribunal to consider whether it was plausible for arrest warrants to be left at the house when he was absent.
The court upheld the tribunal’s credibility findings, including its reliance on the differing accounts about the applicant’s visit to the police station. It also rejected the argument that the tribunal had failed to assess future risk. The tribunal had considered risk on the basis of the facts it accepted, and the court found no accepted factual basis for a further assessment. The applicant’s ethnicity had not been advanced as a ground of risk in his protection claim.
The court also dismissed an alleged error of fact about whether the applicant brought warrants with him when leaving Zimbabwe. He had not denied in evidence telling the tribunal he did not bring them because he did not want to be found with anything suspicious. The court concluded that this ground had no merit.