The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting a Nigerian man’s asylum appeal, finding that three of five credibility findings were unsound and that their cumulative effect undermined the decision as a whole.
In a judgment delivered on 17 June 2015, Ms Justice Faherty ordered the matter remitted to the Tribunal for a de novo hearing before a different member. The court did not decide whether the applicant qualified for refugee status. It reviewed the legality of the Tribunal’s decision, which had rejected his appeal on credibility grounds.
The applicant claimed that he was targeted in Nigeria after a friend, identified in the judgment as V, told him of emails allegedly linking a politician to the financing of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. He said police detained and tortured him, and that he later fled Nigeria after further threats and an attack. These were claims made in his asylum case, not findings by the High Court.
The Tribunal had cited inconsistencies in the account, the applicant’s late reference to other government ministers, his answers about local government areas in Delta State, his travel documentation and failure to seek asylum at the airport, and his manner of answering questions.
The High Court held that the Tribunal had unfairly relied on omissions from an early interview when the applicant’s questionnaire, which set out the basis of his asylum application, contained the central account. The court also found that the Tribunal gave no examples to support its conclusion that the applicant had deliberately tried to confuse the evidence by the way he answered questions.
The court rejected challenges to two other findings. It considered the Tribunal entitled to treat the applicant’s late account of other ministers’ alleged involvement as relevant to credibility, and to rely on his answers about Delta State’s local government areas.
It also found the Tribunal’s travel-related reasoning unsound: the applicant had offered an explanation for not claiming asylum at the airport, saying he relied on the agent who accompanied him, and the court did not consider that explanation incredible. The judgment therefore found three of the five credibility findings unsound.
Because the Tribunal’s findings were cumulative and the court could not determine what weight the flawed findings had carried, it concluded that the overall credibility decision could not stand. The court granted leave at the telescoped hearing, quashed the Tribunal decision and ordered a fresh hearing before a different member.