The High Court dismissed a Pakistani applicant’s judicial review challenge to the refusal of subsidiary protection and the deportation order made against him.
In a judgment delivered on 19 April 2018, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys said the applicant sought certiorari quashing both decisions. The only challenge to the deportation order was that it depended on a flawed subsidiary protection decision.
The applicant had applied for asylum in 2005. That application was rejected in February 2006. His subsidiary protection application was refused on 15 July 2011, and a deportation order followed on 21 September 2011. He was deported on 24 November 2011.
The judge considered two fact-specific complaints. On internal relocation, he said the protection decision’s main basis was that the applicant was not at risk in Pakistan and that his account was not credible. The decision also referred to the applicant being free to relocate, but the judge said it would have been preferable for any internal protection assessment to address the relevant EU directive expressly.
Even assuming the relocation analysis could not be sustained, the judge concluded that this did not invalidate the decision as a whole. He said the credibility finding, the availability of state protection and the finding that the applicant was not at risk of harm were independent grounds. Any defect in the relocation discussion was therefore not fatal.
The second complaint concerned the treatment of alleged past persecution. The judge distinguished a prior case relied on by the applicant’s barrister, where past persecution or serious harm had been found. In this case, the Minister had referred to the applicant’s account as potentially constituting serious harm but also identified credibility concerns. The judge said that was a rejection of the account, not a finding of past serious harm. Without such a finding, he said, there was no need to consider whether past harm could indicate a future risk under the 2006 regulations.
The court dismissed the judicial review application. It did not quash the subsidiary protection refusal or deportation order.