The High Court has partly quashed an International Protection Appeals Tribunal decision refusing a South African woman’s protection appeals, finding that its assessment of internal relocation did not adequately consider her family circumstances and the risk she faced.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys ordered that specified parts of the tribunal decision be quashed and remitted the matter to the same tribunal member to complete the decision in accordance with the court’s judgment. The court did not itself decide the protection applications.
The applicant’s core account of harm was accepted by the tribunal member. She said that after discovering in 2015 that her partner, a Nigerian national identified as Mr O., was involved in organising prostitution, she was falsely imprisoned and raped, and threatened that her daughters would be kidnapped and forced into prostitution. The judgment records that she left South Africa for Ireland in February 2016. Her subsidiary protection appeal was heard in April 2018 and rejected in August that year.
The judicial review challenged parts of the tribunal’s decision, including its conclusion that the applicant could relocate within South Africa. The court said the relevant test required consideration of whether she could safely and legally reach another part of the country and could reasonably be expected to settle there.
In assessing reasonableness, the tribunal had to consider the applicant’s personal and family circumstances, including how contact with her children would be maintained if she moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg. The judgment said the tribunal appeared to assume that the children would remain in Cape Town under existing care arrangements, with their mother maintaining contact from a distance, but had not clearly assessed whether that arrangement would be reasonable in the long term. It also said consideration should have been given to whether the children could relocate with her and whether that would be reasonable.
The court separately found that the tribunal could not rationally infer that Mr O. posed no danger to the children merely because they remained in Cape Town and had received financial support from him. Given the tribunal’s finding that he was involved in organising prostitution, the court said his interest in the daughters could not be treated as benign on that basis alone. This risk assessment was connected to the internal relocation decision and was not severable from it.
The order partly quashes paragraphs 5.13 to 5.19, 7.1, 8.7 to 8.9 and 10.1 of the tribunal decision. Those portions must be reconsidered by the same tribunal member in line with the judgment.