The High Court has dismissed a Pakistani applicant’s challenge to the International Protection Appeals Tribunal’s rejection of his asylum and subsidiary protection claims, finding that the tribunal had ample grounds to reject his account.
In a judgment delivered on 19 November 2019, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys said the applicant claimed he had been attacked and threatened by relatives of a person accidentally killed by celebratory gunfire at a wedding in Pakistan. He said he had been falsely accused of causing the death. The applicant later said the attackers were linked to the MQM, an element not included in his original asylum claim.
The applicant had travelled to the UK in 2011 on a valid two-year visa, then came to Ireland and claimed asylum. A transfer order was made in September 2011 to move his claim to the UK under the Dublin system, but he went into hiding and frustrated the transfer. His claims were rejected by the International Protection Office in July 2018, and the tribunal dismissed his appeal in May 2019.
The judicial review challenged aspects of the tribunal’s credibility assessment. The applicant argued that the tribunal wrongly treated the MQM account as new and misunderstood inconsistencies in his descriptions of a second assault. The judge said the tribunal’s account of the evidence was open to debate in places, but the applicant had given several incompatible versions of whether he saw the attackers and whether he identified them as the dead man’s relatives or as MQM members. The court found no legal error in the tribunal’s treatment of those inconsistencies.
The applicant also argued that the tribunal had relied on gut feeling and an implausibility concerning payment to an agent, despite his UK visa. The judge rejected that challenge, saying credibility assessments may consider all evidence, including travel arrangements and matters outside the core of a protection claim. He said it was rational for the tribunal to question why the applicant would pay a substantial sum to reach the UK when he already had a valid visa.
The judge also rejected the claim that the tribunal had ignored the applicant’s section 35 report, noting that it was referenced in the tribunal decision. He concluded that the tribunal had given detailed reasons and had sufficient material to reject the account. The judicial review application was dismissed; the court did not itself decide the underlying protection claims.