The High Court has granted an anonymised Kenyan applicant leave to seek judicial review on one ground: whether the Refugee Appeals Tribunal (RAT) was entitled to reject two newspaper articles submitted in support of her refugee claim as inauthentic.
Mr Justice Mac Eochaidh’s judgment, delivered on 15 June 2015, concerns an ex parte application challenging the RAT’s 30 March 2015 decision, which affirmed a recommendation that the applicant not be declared a refugee. The court was deciding whether she had shown substantial grounds to bring a judicial review, not the ultimate lawfulness of the RAT decision.
The applicant said she had been threatened and followed in Kenya after a relationship with a Muslim man, and believed she was targeted by extremists. Her account included attacks on churches she had attended, a threatening leaflet left at her sister’s home, and a break-in. The RAT rejected her account as not credible, citing, among other matters, its assessment that the church attacks were not shown to have targeted her, doubts about the leaflet account, and inconsistencies between her testimony and a police report.
The judge rejected challenges to the RAT’s treatment of the church attacks and the accounts of men following the applicant and leaving a leaflet. He said the tribunal had given reasoned explanations for its assessments and that assessing whether events were plausible did not, by itself, amount to relying on conjecture. He also rejected the challenge to the police report finding, noting that discrepancies between the report and the applicant’s account had been put to her and were not adequately explained. The judgment says a decision-maker is not invariably required to verify a document’s provenance; its contents may be assessed.
The newspaper articles were different. The RAT had relied on spelling errors, inconsistencies in detail and a discrepancy about who provided information to one article. The judge said typographical errors and inconsistent reporting did not establish that articles were fake, particularly where the applicant said she had no direct contact with the journalists and was not responsible for the articles’ contents. He found substantial grounds for a challenge to that authenticity finding alone.
The court invited the applicant’s counsel to reformulate the relevant ground of challenge. The judgment does not decide the eventual judicial review or grant refugee status.