The High Court has refused an Ethiopian applicant’s judicial review challenge to a decision affirming a recommendation that he should not be declared a refugee.
Mr Justice David Keane ruled on 27 June 2018 that the applicant had not established that the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) failed to consider relevant material about his online political activity or country of origin information on Ethiopia. The court reviewed the decision-making process; it did not rehear the underlying asylum claim.
The applicant’s permitted challenge concerned a letter he sent to the tribunal on 21 March 2016 and country information about risks to bloggers and Facebook users in Ethiopia. The letter included two social media posts that he said he had made while in Ethiopia. The tribunal said it had considered all the documentation, but considered the late-submitted posts added nothing probative.
The applicant had claimed that Ethiopian authorities targeted him because of his political activity and online criticism, and that he faced arrest, detention, torture or ill-treatment if returned. The IPAT had rejected his account of being personally targeted as not credible and found he had not shown that he could be identified or traced as the person behind the online posts. Those were the tribunal’s conclusions, not findings made afresh by the High Court.
The judge accepted that the tribunal had to consider relevant country information, including a Human Rights Watch report describing pressure and threats against some bloggers and Facebook users in Ethiopia. But he found no unusual circumstances requiring the tribunal to discuss that report specifically in its written decision. The tribunal had accepted that the Ethiopian government harshly suppressed dissent and persecuted known dissidents and members of Ginbot 7. The judge said the case turned on the applicant’s credibility and whether he could be identified through his posts, and that the report did not establish that the tribunal had overlooked relevant material.
The applicant also sought to argue that the tribunal had erred in its treatment of the concept of “refugee sur place”. The High Court said leave to pursue that ground had been refused and the applicant had not appealed. It held that it had no jurisdiction in these proceedings to consider grounds on which leave had been refused.
The judicial review application was refused. The ruling did not grant the requested order quashing the IPAT decision.