The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing an Iranian Kurdish man’s asylum appeal, finding that the Tribunal wrongly relied on a provision concerning United Nations protection and failed to explain its assessment of his risk if returned to Iran.
Mr Justice Hanna delivered judgment on 31 January 2013 after a telescoped judicial review hearing on 23 January. The court quashed the Tribunal’s decision of 27 May 2009 and sent the appeal back for fresh consideration by a Tribunal member who had not previously dealt with the case. It did not decide whether the applicant qualified for refugee status.
The applicant said he had been forced to leave Iran as a child because of his Kurdish ethnicity and had lived in the Altash refugee camp in Iraq. He described working publicly for the Democratic Party of Kurdish Kurdistan (KDPI) there, including arranging events and distributing newspapers, before ceasing his activities in 2002. He later received recognition as a refugee from the UNHCR in Turkey and came to Ireland in 2006. He feared persecution in Iran because of his past KDPI activities and the possibility that Iranian authorities viewed him as a supporter. The judgment records that his credibility was not impugned in the asylum process.
The Tribunal refused his appeal in 2009. It said he did not fall within a risk category and that, having received UNHCR protection, he was excluded by Article 1D of the Refugee Convention. On judicial review, the applicant argued that Article 1D did not apply to someone protected by the UNHCR and challenged the Tribunal’s treatment of a KDPI letter from Paris.
The High Court held that Article 1D concerns people receiving protection or assistance from United Nations bodies other than the UNHCR. It found that the Tribunal had made an error of law by applying that provision to the applicant, whose protection had been provided by the UNHCR. The court said this error could not be separated from the rest of the decision because the Tribunal’s analysis was exceptionally brief and Article 1D may have been central to its reasoning.
The court also found that the Tribunal had irrationally discounted the KDPI letter. It said the discrepancies cited were marginal and that the letter did not establish that the applicant had recently lived in Iran. The Tribunal had not adequately explained its conclusion that he faced no risk: it did not identify the relevant risk categories, assess his activities in the camp against country information, or explain how prominent he might have appeared to Iranian authorities. The court noted that the Tribunal had not heard proposed evidence from the applicant’s brother about those activities.
The order quashed the 2009 decision and remitted the appeal for a fresh decision. The judgment does not determine the outcome of that reconsideration.