The High Court has refused a family’s application to quash an International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) decision recommending that they should not receive refugee status or subsidiary protection. Mr Justice Cian Ferriter held that the applicants had not established that IPAT made an error of law in assessing their credibility.
The judicial review concerned IPAT’s decision of 29 June 2020. The applicants argued that the tribunal had applied too high a standard of proof, confused general credibility with the benefit of the doubt, failed to explain its treatment of section 28(7) of the International Protection Act 2015, and wrongly rejected police complaint documents from Pakistan.
The family’s protection claim relied on four main assertions: that AH had been involved with the MQM political party and was threatened after leaving it; that AH and SH married without their families’ approval; that SH’s family threatened them and attacked AH’s family home; and that SH was threatened in the UK by someone who knew her family.
IPAT found that several central parts of the account were not credible. Its concerns included the lack of documents supporting AH’s claimed return to Pakistan in 2011, the timing and circumstances of the marriage, SH’s account of living with AH’s family after the alleged attack, and the applicants’ failure to report threats to UK police or seek protection in the UK. It concluded that their general credibility had not been established and declined to give them the benefit of the doubt. It also found that the two Pakistani police complaint documents, known as FIRs, could not be accepted as reliable.
In the High Court, the applicants also argued that SH had no alternative but to live with AH’s family and that their reasons for not reporting threats in the UK had not been properly considered. Justice Ferriter treated those arguments as challenges to the merits of IPAT’s assessment, rather than evidence that its decision-making process was unlawful.
The judge found that IPAT had set out credibility concerns under each part of the claim, considered the explanations for missing documentation and explained why it rejected them. Since IPAT had expressly found that the applicants’ general credibility was not established, the separate question of accepting unsupported elements under section 28(7) did not materially arise. The judge also held that IPAT’s assessment of the FIRs was open to it in light of its credibility findings.
The court dismissed the respondents’ preliminary objection that the applicants’ arguments went beyond the grounds on which they had been granted leave to proceed. It then rejected the substantive challenge and refused the relief sought. The judgment does not grant or decide any protection status; it concerns the lawfulness of IPAT’s decision-making.