The High Court has refused an anonymised applicant’s judicial review challenge to the International Protection Appeals Tribunal’s decision to affirm the rejection of his application for international protection. The court also ordered the applicant to pay the respondents’ costs.
In a judgment delivered on 28 October 2021, Ms Justice Tara Burns found that the applicant had not established any of the grounds on which he challenged the Tribunal’s decision. The ruling concerned the legality of that decision; the court did not itself determine a protection application afresh.
The applicant, a Zimbabwean national, said he feared harm because he was bisexual or would be perceived as bisexual. He claimed that he was assaulted by community members in March 2018 after being seen kissing a male partner, and was threatened afterwards. The Tribunal rejected his account on the balance of probabilities, including that he identified as bisexual or differently orientated and that the claimed attack occurred.
The judicial review focused on three credibility findings concerning a GALZ membership card. The applicant had said at an initial protection interview that he had never belonged to an LGBT organisation and could not name one. He later produced a GALZ card and said it had been left in Zimbabwe. He explained that attempts to send it by courier had failed, before a friend of his mother obtained it and posted it from the UK.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal had speculated in finding that the alleged courier attempts were not credible, including because the card had not been concealed. The High Court said the Tribunal was assessing whether the attempts had occurred, not whether they could ultimately have succeeded. It was entitled to apply common sense to the inconsistencies in the account. The judge also upheld the Tribunal’s finding that the applicant had answered evasively when he did not directly answer a question about the second courier attempt, and its finding that his lack of knowledge about the location of GALZ’s Harare office did not corroborate his claimed membership.
The applicant also argued that the Tribunal had failed to consider whether he might be persecuted because others perceived him as bisexual, regardless of his actual sexuality. The court said the claim of community suspicion had not been supported by details or evidence separate from the rejected account of the relationship and attack. On the evidence before the Tribunal, separate consideration of that asserted basis for protection did not arise.
The High Court therefore refused the relief sought and made an order for the respondents’ costs against the applicant.