The High Court has quashed an International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) decision refusing an Eswatini woman’s subsidiary protection appeal, after finding errors in its assessment of country information about PUDEMO T-shirts and membership cards. The matter was remitted to a different IPAT member for rehearing.
In a judgment delivered on 27 November 2018, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys upheld two grounds of challenge concerning the tribunal’s reasoning. He said the decision’s problematic parts could not be separated from the rest, so the appropriate order was certiorari quashing the decision and remitting the case.
The applicant, whose identity is anonymised in the judgment, was born in Malawi and later moved to Swaziland, now called Eswatini. She said she became involved with opposition movement PUDEMO after police harassed her in 2013 over wearing trousers. She claimed a risk of persecution connected to that involvement.
The tribunal had questioned her account that she received PUDEMO materials, including a T-shirt, in June 2014. It relied on country information referring to arrests for wearing such shirts in April or May 2014, reasoning that PUDEMO would have known the risks of distributing them. The High Court found that information already before the tribunal referred to the 2010 arrest of Sipho Jele for wearing a PUDEMO T-shirt and his subsequent death in custody. The tribunal had not accounted for that earlier incident, which undermined the significance it attached to the timing of the later arrests. The judge upheld the applicant’s factual-error ground on that issue.
The judge also found a lack of reasoning in the tribunal’s comparison between the claimed distribution of T-shirts in June 2014 and PUDEMO’s later decision to stop issuing membership cards. The country information indicated that card distribution stopped in January 2016, but the decision did not explain how that later change illuminated the movement’s thinking in 2014. The court upheld the challenge insofar as it alleged inadequate reasons.
Other grounds were rejected. The judge said the tribunal could consider why the applicant came to Ireland, and found no established procedural unfairness concerning questions about T-shirt arrests. He also concluded that the tribunal’s suspicions about emails submitted by the applicant were justified when viewed alongside its rejection of a purported police summons as suspicious and inconsistent with her account. The High Court did not decide the underlying protection claim; it ordered a rehearing by another tribunal member.