The High Court has refused an application for judicial review of a decision rejecting a Pakistani man’s appeal against the refusal of refugee status, finding that defects in some credibility findings did not undermine the separate conclusion that he had not established a Convention reason for his claimed fear of persecution.
The judgment, delivered by Ms Justice Faherty on 19 May 2015, concerned a claim arising from a family land dispute. The applicant said a cousin wanted his portion of inherited land to build a plaza or petrol station, threatened him when he refused to sell, and was shot in the leg during a later armed struggle. The applicant said he then fled Pakistan and travelled to Ireland with an agent.
The Refugee Appeals Tribunal rejected his appeal in 2011. It made adverse credibility findings about his travel, the shooting and events after it, and rejected documents submitted in support of his account, including a First Information Report (FIR) and a newspaper report. It also found no Convention nexus: the legal link between the claimed persecution and a ground recognised by refugee law.
Justice Faherty found that the Tribunal’s reasoning about how the applicant could have crossed international frontiers in trucks or containers was speculative. She also found its assessment of his failure to produce a passport flawed, and said those findings had infected its general credibility assessment. The Tribunal’s doubts about the FIR’s authenticity lacked an adequate basis, she held, and its reasons for treating the document as inconsistent with the applicant’s account did not properly allow for the possibility that the complainant had given police a different version of events.
However, the judge left other credibility findings undisturbed, including findings concerning the shooting, the events at the friend’s house in Islamabad and the vacant land. She also found no basis to overturn the Tribunal’s conclusion on state protection. She did not need to determine the challenge to internal relocation.
The applicant argued in the High Court that his membership of a family engaged in a land feud could constitute a particular social group. But the judge found that this was not the case presented to the Tribunal. There, the asserted social group was landowners in Pakistan, and the applicant had not challenged the Tribunal’s conclusion on the cousin’s personal business motives for seeking the land. Taking the applicant’s account at its highest, the judge held that the Tribunal’s conclusion on the absence of a Convention nexus was open to it.
The court therefore held that the flawed credibility findings could be severed from the lawful decision on the Convention nexus. The application for judicial review was refused; the judgment does not grant refugee status.