The High Court has declined to quash an International Protection Appeals Tribunal decision refusing a Pakistani national refugee status or subsidiary protection. It found the tribunal’s assessment of the applicant’s account and the reasons it gave were supported by the evidence and lawful.
The judicial review concerned the tribunal’s decision of 20 October 2020. The applicant argued that the tribunal had failed to return to key credibility issues after saying it would, had not properly assessed documents he submitted, and had not rationally considered whether he faced persecution or serious harm if returned to Pakistan. The respondents argued that the decision, read as a whole, was balanced and supported by the evidence.
The applicant’s account was that a childhood friend, identified in the judgment as Mr R., told him he worked for Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency and asked him to hold a sealed envelope. The applicant said the friend later arrived injured, claimed the agency was trying to kill him, and warned that the applicant had become a target. The applicant also said he and his family were pursued, and that he later left Pakistan for the United Kingdom before travelling to Ireland.
He alleged that his wife and brother-in-law were involved in a staged road accident in July 2018, in which the brother-in-law died and his wife was injured. He also challenged the tribunal’s treatment of a first information report and arrest warrant that he said had been used to implicate him falsely. These were the applicant’s claims; the High Court did not determine that the alleged attacks or the applicant’s account of them occurred.
The court held that the tribunal had considered the disputed credibility issues as part of its overall assessment. It found the tribunal was entitled to conclude that the death certificate and hospital discharge note did not establish that the road accident involved malicious or criminal conduct. It also accepted the tribunal’s concerns about the FIR evidence, including the applicant’s account that the document was a false complaint filed with police.
The High Court said the challenge to the tribunal’s treatment of past trauma under section 28(6) of the International Protection Act 2015 did not arise from the grounds on which leave had been granted. It added that, in any event, the tribunal had not found that the applicant’s trauma resulted from persecution or serious harm by the state or a state actor.
The court declined all relief sought in the notice of motion. Because the judgment was delivered electronically, the parties were given four weeks to make brief written submissions on the terms of the final order, costs and any other matter arising. The judgment did not itself settle those matters.