The High Court refused an application to quash a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting a woman’s appeal for refugee status, despite finding that the Tribunal had made a factual error about when she returned home.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice McCarthy on 28 July 2009, concerned a Tribunal decision recommending refusal of the applicant’s request for a declaration that she was a refugee. Leave for judicial review had been granted on two grounds: an alleged error about her passport and an alleged error about whether she returned home on 14 March 2006.
The applicant said she feared persecution in Belarus because of her political opinion and her membership and activity with the Belarusian Social Democratic Party. The Tribunal’s rejection of her appeal rested on adverse credibility findings.
The court rejected the passport ground. The Tribunal had treated as contradictory the applicant’s questionnaire answer that her passport was stolen and her account that the KGB took it during a search of her mother’s home. The judge held there was evidence on which the Tribunal could rationally find a contradiction. He said it was not his role in judicial review to decide whether the Tribunal was right or wrong once it had evidence on which it could act.
The judge found a clear error in the Tribunal’s account of the applicant’s return home. Her earlier interview statement that she did not return home referred to the period after 31 March 2006, following her husband’s hospital stay. The Tribunal had treated it as relating to the period after the 14 March search, creating a conflict with her evidence at the hearing where no conflict existed.
However, the judge concluded that this error did not have the capacity to affect the decision-making process in a material way. The Tribunal had given separate reasons for other adverse credibility conclusions, including its assessments of her account of political involvement, travel to Ireland, fear of the KGB, and her use of the word “boycott”. The judge considered those matters more significant than the error about when she returned home. A statutory point concerning her failure to seek asylum before arriving in Ireland did not appear to have been a significant factor.
The court therefore refused the relief sought. It did not overturn the Tribunal’s decision or determine the applicant’s refugee claim on its merits.