The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing an asylum appeal after finding that the tribunal ruled before the deadline it had set for further medical reports expired.
Mr Justice Paul McDermott held that the early decision breached fair procedures. He ordered that the appeal be reheard by a differently constituted tribunal. The court did not decide whether the applicant qualified for refugee status.
The anonymised applicant, identified in the judgment as B.K., said he was a Kosovo national and a member of the Gypsy/Ashkali minority. He claimed he was shot in the leg outside his family home in Lipjan in March 2004, and that his father was also shot at when he came to help. The shooting and its alleged ethnic motivation were central to his asylum claim.
The Refugee Appeals Tribunal upheld the recommendation that he be refused refugee status. At an oral hearing on 17 June 2008, the tribunal allowed him 14 days to provide medical evidence about the alleged wound. It made and signed its decision on 28 June, before that period expired. The decision nevertheless referred to time remaining for the reports and relied on the absence of medical evidence when assessing the applicant’s account.
The judge found that the tribunal had decided the appeal in advance of its own deadline, without explanation. Although no further medical report was ultimately provided, the judge said that submitting one after the decision had been made would have been futile. He described the premature determination as a serious breach of fair procedures and said allowing it to stand would undermine the integrity and credibility of the asylum process.
The court also considered the applicant’s other challenges to the tribunal’s credibility assessment. It found that the tribunal had placed unwarranted weight on an immediately corrected error in the incident date. It had also wrongly treated the wait for medical treatment as 24 hours, when the account described treatment the following morning. However, the judge was not satisfied that the remaining challenges showed the tribunal had acted unreasonably or irrationally in assessing the evidence as a whole. Those grounds did not independently justify quashing the decision.
The judgment’s conclusion refers to the decision quashed as dated 28 May 2008, although its account of the tribunal’s decision repeatedly gives 28 June 2008. The court’s order was to quash the tribunal decision and remit the appeal for a new hearing before a differently constituted tribunal.