The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting the credibility of two parents seeking asylum for their family, finding that the reasons given were irrational and inadequately supported. The case was remitted to the Tribunal for reconsideration.
The applicants, identified in the judgment by initials, are a family of mixed Ossetian and Georgian ethnicity. They said they fled Georgia after a shooting at their home in February 2008 left the wife’s cousin and a Georgian policeman dead. The family said Ossetians blamed them for the cousin’s death and police blamed them for the policeman’s death.
The Tribunal rejected the husband’s account as vague, lacking expected detail and implausible. But Mr Justice Colm Mac Eochaidh said he had reviewed the written accounts and could not identify the claimed lack of detail. He found that no reasonable decision-maker could have described the account as vague or non-specific. The stated reason therefore did not follow from the evidence and was difficult to understand as a basis for dismissing the asylum claim.
The Tribunal also disbelieved the wife’s account partly because police had not taken her away for questioning, sealed the house or conducted a forensic examination after the shootings. The judgment records evidence that police questioned her twice at the house, after which she left with her children for a nearby uncle’s home. The house was later burned down.
The judge said the Tribunal’s assumptions about police conduct were conjecture. There was no evidence before it establishing what Georgian police would routinely do, and the wife had not been asked about whether a forensic examination took place after she left. The court also noted country information describing deficiencies in the Georgian police force and said their conduct could not be assumed to match Irish police practice.
The judge held that the credibility findings were unlawful. He did not analyse the Tribunal’s other findings on internal relocation or state protection because the respondents’ counsel accepted that the case turned on the credibility findings.
The court granted leave to seek judicial review, made final orders of certiorari quashing the decision, and directed that the matter be reconsidered by the Tribunal. At the applicant’s election, the judgment may be placed on the file for the next decision-maker to view.