The High Court refused M.Y.’s application for leave to seek judicial review of decisions refusing him refugee status. The application sought to quash a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision and a consequential decision by the Minister for Justice and Equality. The court held that M.Y. had not shown a substantial ground for granting leave.
M.Y. argued that the Tribunal’s decision contained an error when it said he had never claimed during his asylum case that he could not live openly as a gay man in Morocco. He also argued that the Tribunal’s finding on the connection between his claim and a Convention ground was unreasoned.
Justice O’Regan accepted that the statement about his ability to be openly gay was erroneous. But she found it could be severed from the rest of the Tribunal’s decision because it had not undermined the credibility assessment. Reading the decision as a whole, she concluded that the Tribunal’s finding that M.Y. had not fled Morocco because of his sexual orientation was rationally supported by other facts.
The judgment records that M.Y. said his relationship with a man began when he was 22 and lasted about two and a half to three years. The Tribunal placed it around 1998. M.Y. also said that a woman he met later became pregnant, after which her relatives attacked him. The judgment says his daughter was aged eight at the time of the relevant interview, which suggested he left Morocco around 2008. The court noted that this was more than five years after the end of the relationship.
On the Convention nexus argument, Justice O’Regan said the Tribunal’s conclusion had to be read alongside its assessment of whether M.Y. had established past persecution or a forward-looking fear of persecution. Read as a whole, the decision gave reasons for finding that he had not established the necessary connection.
The judgment also records the Tribunal’s acceptance that Morocco criminalised homosexual activity, with prison sentences of up to three years, and that people had been prosecuted and imprisoned for such activity. The High Court’s ruling addressed only whether there were substantial grounds for leave to seek judicial review. It refused leave; it did not grant the requested orders to quash the decisions.