The High Court has refused a judicial review challenge by two anonymised applicants to decisions rejecting their international protection claims, finding that their challenge to the tribunal’s subsidiary protection assessment was not made out.
In a judgment delivered on 11 June 2021, Ms Justice Tara Burns said the applicants, South African citizens, had entered Ireland in October 2016 and claimed protection with their five children as dependants. Leave to seek judicial review had been granted in July 2020. The applicants sought to quash the International Protection Appeals Tribunal’s decision.
The applicants said the first applicant, who was born in Bangladesh, faced persecution or serious harm in South Africa because of his Bangladeshi origins. They alleged xenophobic or racially motivated attacks, including a 2015 mob attack at his shop and a 2016 armed attack on the family home in which he was shot. They also alleged kidnappings and police involvement or failure to protect them.
The tribunal accepted that the shop and home attacks occurred but rejected the claims of kidnapping and police collusion. It found the shop incident arose from commercial jealousy and the home attack was financially motivated, rather than racially or xenophobically motivated. The applicants did not contest the tribunal’s credibility findings.
The tribunal considered that the first applicant might face harm in which xenophobia or racism could contribute, but found effective state protection would be available if such violence occurred. It did not find a reasonable likelihood that the applicants would face a future attack. It also concluded that the accepted incidents did not establish a real risk of future serious harm warranting subsidiary protection.
The applicants argued that the tribunal had failed to give adequate reasons, acted irrationally and made an error of law by referring to the absence of intentional or negligent treatment by South African authorities. Justice Burns said the reasons for the tribunal’s conclusion could be inferred from its assessment of the two incidents and its findings about the authorities’ role.
The judge held that two previous, unrelated criminal attacks did not by themselves establish a real future risk of inhuman or degrading treatment. Although she described the tribunal’s wording about state involvement as “unfortunate”, she found it did not show that the tribunal had wrongly understood that serious harm must come from the state. The issue of state protection for future non-racially motivated incidents therefore did not arise.
Justice Burns refused the relief sought and ordered costs for the respondents against the applicants. The judgment does not grant or revoke protection status; it rejects this judicial review challenge to the tribunal’s decision.