The High Court has quashed the International Protection Appeals Tribunal’s refusal of an Albanian man’s protection appeal, finding serious flaws in how the tribunal understood his case and assessed accepted facts when considering future risk.
In a judgment delivered on 25 June 2021, Ms Justice Tara Burns ordered certiorari of the tribunal’s 22 October 2019 decision. The court did not decide whether the applicant qualified for international protection. That question remains for reconsideration following the quashing of the tribunal decision.
The applicant, identified in the judgment only as NL, said he feared the family of three men convicted of murdering his younger brother in 2010. He also said that, because of the Kanun blood-feud tradition in Northern Albania, the men might expect him to seek revenge and attack him first. Separately, he argued that pressure from relatives and neighbours to take revenge would worsen his post-traumatic stress disorder.
The tribunal accepted a number of important facts, including that the brother had been murdered, that the applicant had PTSD, that his father received threatening communications, and that the applicant was injured in a hit-and-run incident in November 2015. It rejected his claims for refugee status and subsidiary protection, finding that he had not established the required risk.
The High Court found that the tribunal had focused on whether an actual blood feud existed between the families, rather than assessing the applicant’s case that the local tradition could lead the convicted men to anticipate revenge and strike first. The judge said this was a material error.
The court also found a factual error in the tribunal’s account of when evidence about the hit-and-run was submitted. The applicant’s medical documentation had been sent to the protection office in February 2018, before the officer’s report and before the appeal. The tribunal had treated the information as arriving later. The court stressed that the applicant had not identified the K family as responsible based on direct evidence; the accepted fact was that he had been the victim of a hit-and-run.
The judge further held that accepted events, including the hit-and-run and threatening communications to the applicant’s father, should have been carried into the tribunal’s assessment of future risk. The tribunal’s failure to consider relevant matters when assessing whether the applicant genuinely feared the K family also affected its credibility analysis, the court said.
The court rejected other grounds. It found the tribunal was entitled to conclude that the social pressure described was not as constant or intense as alleged, and dismissed challenges concerning a photograph said to link one of the convicted men to a politician, delay, and Albania’s designation as a safe country of origin. The judge also rejected the applicant’s challenge to the applicable standard of proof.
The court ordered certiorari quashing the tribunal’s decision and awarded the applicant 75% of his costs against the respondents.