The High Court has refused an applicant’s judicial review challenge to a 2016 decision denying him subsidiary protection in Ireland, while extending the time allowed to bring the case.
The applicant, anonymised in the judgment as C.G., is a Bangladeshi national and Hindu. He came to Ireland on a student visa in 2006 and applied for refugee status in 2010 after returning from a visit to Bangladesh. His refugee claim was rejected, and a later application for subsidiary protection was also refused.
The International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT), then called the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, upheld the refusal on 19 May 2016. It found that the applicant had not established the credibility of his personal account, a finding he did not challenge in the judicial review. The tribunal accepted that he was Bangladeshi and Hindu, and that country information recorded serious violence against Hindus and political violence. It nevertheless concluded that he had not shown a lack of effective state protection. It did not consider whether he could relocate within Bangladesh, having found that state protection was available.
The applicant argued that the tribunal had misunderstood the law on local failures of protection, selectively used country information, and applied the wrong legal test. The High Court rejected each ground. Justice David Keane read the tribunal’s statement that local failures do not necessarily amount to a failure of the state as a whole in the context of its wider decision. He concluded that the tribunal had not treated local failures as irrelevant in every case or misapplied the law.
The judge also found that the applicant had not identified a significant conflict in the country information requiring the tribunal to explain why it preferred one account over another. His criticism concerned the weight and context given to material, which the court found was for the tribunal to assess. The court further rejected the claim that the tribunal used an incorrect test for effective protection, noting that the applicant bore the burden of establishing state inability or unwillingness to protect with clear and convincing evidence.
On timing, the proceedings were outside the statutory 28-day period. The respondents took a neutral position on an extension. The judge found that the delay was reasonably short and that the applicant had acted diligently, and extended time to 25 July 2016, when leave to bring the judicial review was granted.
The court refused the application. It did not quash the tribunal’s decision.