The High Court has refused an Albanian man’s application for judicial review of a decision refusing his international protection appeal, finding that the tribunal had not made adverse findings without giving him an opportunity to address the issues.
The anonymised applicant, referred to in the judgment as Mr M, said he feared being killed by a criminal gang after a man or boy described as his brother or nephew was murdered in Greece. The judgment says the gang allegedly had an international reach. Mr M’s initial protection application and his papers-only appeal to the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) were unsuccessful. He challenged the tribunal’s decision of 7 March 2019.
On his first ground, Mr M argued that IPAT breached natural and constitutional justice by making fresh findings without prior notice during a papers-only appeal. The court said the central question was whether he could reasonably be taken to have known about the issues on which the tribunal reached adverse conclusions. It found that he could.
The judge noted that the location of the alleged aggressor and Mr M’s apparent lack of knowledge about the gang members he feared had already been considered by the International Protection Office (IPO). IPAT had also written to Mr M on 8 April 2019, inviting him to address the IPO’s specific credibility findings in any further submission. No reply was sent. The court concluded that the tribunal had not erred or breached justice by proceeding as it did.
Mr M’s second ground challenged IPAT’s authority to hear the appeal, arguing that the IPO examination had not been carried out by an authorised person. His counsel acknowledged that the law, following a 2019 High Court decision, was against him at the time. The judge described this ground as a “placeholder” argument, noting that an appeal in that other case had been heard by the Supreme Court and judgment was awaited.
The High Court refused the reliefs sought. Separately, in an obiter comment, the judge expressed unease that applicants were required to swear to their religion in grounding affidavits, saying this appeared to trespass on privacy. That observation was not part of the court’s ruling on Mr M’s grounds.