The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting an anonymised applicant’s appeal and remitted the case for fresh consideration by a different Tribunal member.
In a judgment delivered on 28 September 2010, Ms Justice M. Clark found that the Tribunal had not adequately considered medical evidence supporting the applicant’s account of torture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The court’s order sets aside the Tribunal decision; it does not determine the applicant’s entitlement to refugee status.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as R. M. K., said he worked as an engineer at the DRC’s state-controlled television station and authorised broadcasts about politically sensitive subjects. He said he was arrested in May 2003, detained for 63 days at the GLM centre in Kinshasa and tortured before escaping to Ireland. Those were his claims, not findings made by the High Court.
The Refugee Appeals Tribunal had rejected his appeal after a fresh hearing. It relied on credibility concerns, including inconsistencies about the timing of his arrest and how he obtained photographs used in a broadcast. It also considered whether the GLM detention centre remained closed after an official closure order in 2001. The Tribunal allowed that it might have continued to operate secretly but did not resolve the question.
The applicant’s appeal included reports from his GP, a consultant psychiatrist and a SPIRASI examining physician. The SPIRASI report described physical findings as highly consistent with or typical of the abuse he reported. The Tribunal accepted that scars and marks were present but did not accept that they resulted from treatment by DRC security forces, giving the reports little weight in light of its credibility concerns.
The High Court said credibility assessment and the weight of evidence were matters for the Tribunal, and it rejected the argument that the medical reports had to be assessed at a particular earlier stage. However, it held that the reports’ objective findings required strong countervailing evidence to negate their evidential impact. Given the unresolved evidence about whether the GLM could have been operating in 2003, the court found the reasons for rejecting the medical evidence inadequate and the decision irrational.
The court granted certiorari quashing the Tribunal’s decision dated 18 December 2009 and directed that the appeal be reconsidered by a different Tribunal member. The judgment did not itself make a finding that the applicant had been tortured or grant refugee status.