The High Court has refused an application to quash a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting an Iranian Kurdish man’s claim for refugee status. Mr Justice Cooke delivered judgment on 13 May 2009.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as H. H. M., was born in Iran in 1982 to Iranian Kurdish parents, according to the background set out in the Tribunal’s decision. His parents fled to Iraq when he was a few days old, and he lived at the Al Tash camp until he came to Ireland in 2006. He had no identity papers and said in his asylum application that he had no citizenship.
His original claim was that the relatives of a Muslim girl who became pregnant by him and was later killed in an honour killing would kill him if he returned to Iraq. The applicant accepted before the High Court that this feared harm was not based on a reason recognised by the Refugee Convention. The dispute concerned uncertainty about whether he could establish Iranian nationality, and whether the Tribunal had properly addressed the possibility of return to Iran.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal’s reasoning was contradictory: it said Iraq could not be considered if he had Iranian citizenship, but later assessed his claim by reference to Iraq. He also argued that the Tribunal breached fair procedures and section 16(8) of the Refugee Act 1996 by relying on an “Iranian Refugees at Risk” report that had not been disclosed to him.
The court found no contradiction. It read the Tribunal’s analysis as addressing the practical difficulty of proving Iranian citizenship and the consequences if the applicant had neither Iranian nor Iraqi citizenship. The judgment said the possibility of arrest and imprisonment in Iran had arisen at the hearing as a consequence of trying to enter without Iranian papers, rather than as a separate claim of Convention-based persecution there. The court said no conclusion on a risk of persecution in Iran was required because that was not the claim before the Tribunal.
On the report, the court said there may have been technical non-compliance with the statutory disclosure requirement, though it was not certain. It declined to quash the decision on that basis, finding the report confirmed an assertion made by the applicant and had no material bearing on the Tribunal’s conclusion about his Iraq-based claim.
The High Court rejected both grounds and refused the application for judicial review. It did not quash the Tribunal’s decision.