The High Court refused an applicant leave to challenge the rejection of her asylum claim, while severing a passage in the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s decision that referred to internal relocation to Port Sudan.
In a judgment delivered on 4 October 2012, Ms Justice M. H. Clark said the Tribunal’s extensive adverse credibility findings could not be impugned. The applicant, anonymised in the judgment as S. I. A. (Sudan), claimed to be from Darfur and to belong to the Birqid tribe. She said Janjaweed militia attacked her village, killed her mother and left her with burn injuries. She also claimed that security forces later threatened her because they were seeking her uncle, whom she described as a political activist.
The Tribunal had rejected her account, citing her inability to give detail about the village attack and journeys across Sudan. The High Court said the applicant had opportunities to explain her experiences at interview and at the appeal hearing, but had not provided coherent or plausible answers to basic questions. It inferred from the Tribunal’s decision that the Tribunal accepted her Sudanese nationality but did not accept her claimed Birqid ethnicity or other parts of her account.
The court also addressed a procedural defect: the applicant’s grounding affidavit was in English, although she claimed to be illiterate and had required an Arabic interpreter during her asylum process. It contained no reference to anyone translating or reading it to her, and no translator’s affidavit as required by the Rules of the Superior Courts. The court ruled the affidavit inadmissible, but heard the application de bene esse to consider whether fairness required it to examine the merits. The applicant also required a nine-day extension of time.
Although the judge found the credibility decision sound, she criticised the Tribunal’s separate statement that the applicant could relocate within Sudan, particularly to Port Sudan. The judgment said that reasoning was inconsistent with rejecting the claim on credibility grounds and did not address the general conditions in the proposed area or the applicant’s personal circumstances, as required by the 2006 Protection Regulations.
The court treated the relocation passage as an ill-considered afterthought and severed it. It then refused leave, citing the negative credibility findings, the affidavit defect and the required time extension. The applicant was allowed some costs because the relocation reference had legitimately clouded the Tribunal’s reasons for rejecting her claim.