The High Court has rejected a Nigerian man’s challenge to the Minister’s refusal of subsidiary protection, finding that the decision did not apply an incorrect burden of proof and that the Minister had no free-standing duty to investigate an armed-conflict risk he had not identified in his application.
The man had sought judicial review of the January 2008 refusal. He argued that the Minister wrongly required him to conclusively prove his account and failed to consider whether he faced a serious and individual threat from indiscriminate violence in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region.
In a judgment delivered on 14 January 2010, Ms Justice M. H. Clark said the word “conclusively” was inappropriate, but the decision read as a whole did not show that the Minister had imposed that standard. The court found the refusal rested on earlier findings by the Refugee Applications Commissioner and Refugee Appeals Tribunal that the man’s account was not credible, together with the lack of supporting evidence for his claims. The judge said the use of the word did not affect the heart of the decision.
The man claimed he had been detained and mistreated in Nigeria before joining the Delta Youth Movement, an armed militant group. He said he had killed a disarmed soldier during an attack on soldiers guarding an oil pipeline and later became wanted by the Nigerian authorities. The earlier asylum decision-makers rejected his account as lacking credibility. The Minister’s officer also noted that, if the account were true, the killing could raise an exclusion issue under the subsidiary protection rules.
The man’s medical report recorded a broken tooth and hearing loss that a physician said could have resulted from the reported mistreatment. The court said the report did not establish that the injuries came from detention, and the applicant had offered no medical finding that they proved his account.
On the armed-conflict ground, the court found that the application had focused on alleged individual targeting by police and had not set out particulars or evidence of a threat from indiscriminate violence under Article 15(c) of the Qualification Directive. The judge rejected the argument that the Minister had to investigate an unclaimed and unidentified risk. The Minister was required to consider current country information and the applicant’s circumstances, but the applicant also had to make genuine efforts to substantiate his claim.
The court refused the requested order of certiorari, which would have quashed the refusal. It nevertheless awarded the applicant an order for a portion of his costs because the Minister’s decision used ill-chosen language on two occasions, and senior reviewing officers had not corrected it.