The High Court has rejected an Albanian man’s challenge to the refusal of his international protection claim, finding that the appeals tribunal was entitled to decide his case without holding an oral hearing.
The applicant, identified as K.S., claimed he faced a risk of being killed if returned to Albania because of a blood feud between his family and another family. He said the feud originated with the killing of his paternal uncle in 1997, followed by a revenge killing carried out by another uncle in 2001.
K.S. said the dispute resurfaced in 2021 or 2022 and that his family was told he had become a target. He also alleged that three masked men, one armed and two carrying baseball bats, chased him near his home in Tirana in October 2022. He left Albania shortly afterwards, spent about five months in Italy and later travelled to Ireland, where he applied for international protection in May 2023.
The International Protection Office rejected his account as not credible, citing inconsistencies, insufficient detail and country information. The International Protection Appeals Tribunal upheld that refusal in May 2024 on a papers-only appeal.
K.S. argued in the High Court that the Tribunal should have granted him an oral hearing and that it unfairly relied on credibility concerns he had not previously been given a chance to address.
Mr Justice Ferriter rejected those arguments. He found the case was not one in which credibility had been rejected because of demeanour, evasiveness or other matters requiring face-to-face assessment. Instead, the Tribunal was entitled to assess the coherence, consistency and detail of the existing account from the documents before it.
The judge also found that the Tribunal had not introduced any materially new issue on appeal. Although its reasoning differed in emphasis from the earlier IPO decision, it was assessing the same underlying evidence.
The court concluded that the Tribunal’s reasoning was rational and sufficiently explained. K.S. was therefore refused all relief sought in the judicial review.