The High Court has quashed a refusal of subsidiary protection to an anonymised Bangladeshi applicant, finding that the decision failed to comply with a requirement to consider relevant facts about the applicant’s country of origin.
In a judgment delivered on 8 November 2013, Mr Justice Colm Mac Eochaidh found that the Minister’s decision wrongly treated the Refugee Appeals Tribunal as having rejected the applicant’s overall credibility. The judge said the tribunal had expressed doubts about aspects of the account but had not expressly rejected the applicant’s credibility.
The applicant had arrived in Ireland in 2007 as an unaccompanied minor and sought protection based on his account that his father’s political activity had attracted threats in Bangladesh. At an initial interview, he said he did not know his father’s party and had not seen party materials. At a later tribunal hearing, he said he had seen images of Khaleda Zia at home and, after advice from the Refugee Legal Service, identified his father’s party as the BNP.
The tribunal raised credibility concerns about the difference between the accounts and concluded that the applicant’s fear was not objectively well founded. It did not, however, expressly reject his credibility. The Minister’s subsidiary protection report interpreted the tribunal’s concerns as a finding that the applicant’s account was not credible, then relied on that interpretation to dispense with consideration of country-of-origin circumstances under Regulation 5(1)(a) of the 2006 Regulations.
The judge held that the regulation requires consideration of relevant country facts at the time the protection decision is made. He accepted that a comprehensive rejection of an applicant’s credibility could remove the need for that inquiry, because no relevant country facts could assist a claim found to be false. But where only parts of an account are rejected, the extent of the credibility findings affects the scope of the required inquiry.
Because the tribunal had not comprehensively rejected the applicant’s credibility, the Minister’s decision to omit the Regulation 5(1)(a) assessment breached the regulations. The High Court declared the subsidiary protection decision ultra vires and quashed it. Other grounds of challenge were adjourned, with the court to hear from the parties on whether they still needed to be determined. The judgment did not grant subsidiary protection or determine those remaining grounds.