The High Court has quashed an International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) decision refusing an applicant’s protection appeal, ruling that the tribunal failed to assess the risk she might face if returned to Pakistan.
Mr Justice Max Barrett ordered certiorari and remitted the appeal to the IPAT for fresh consideration. The ruling does not grant the applicant refugee or subsidiary protection status; the tribunal must reconsider her appeal.
The applicant, referred to as Ms E in the judgment, sought judicial review of the IPAT decision affirming the initial refusal of her protection application. Her case focused on two issues: the tribunal’s rejection of a newspaper advertisement said to have been placed by her father disowning her, and its failure to assess future risk after finding a connection to the Refugee Convention on the basis that she was a single Pakistani woman.
The court rejected her challenge to the tribunal’s treatment of the advertisement. The tribunal had considered her explanation for why her father would publish it years after she left Pakistan and was entitled to find that explanation unpersuasive, the judge said. The court found no legally assailable deficiency in that reasoning.
But the judge agreed that the tribunal had failed to consider prospective risk. The tribunal accepted that the applicant was a Pakistani national, that her family had attempted to arrange a marriage for her, and that, as a single Pakistani woman, she could face persecution on a Convention ground. It nevertheless concluded that she had no well-founded fear of persecution and faced no real risk of serious harm, without addressing whether she might face persecution if returned.
The judgment said a decision-maker must assess future risk and cannot necessarily set aside disputed past events merely because they were found unlikely to have occurred. In this case, the court said, the tribunal had not shown that it had no real doubt about the advertisement’s non-publication, and the country information before it described forced marriage and so-called honour killings as continuing problems in Pakistan.
The court said the risk assessment must be grounded in elements of the applicant’s account that could be accepted as possibly true; it is not a licence for gratuitous speculation. It concluded that her request for such an assessment had a basis in the circumstances recorded in the decision.
The judge also indicated that, subject to any further argument from the parties, an order for costs in the applicant’s favour appeared appropriate because she had obtained the relief sought, although she had not succeeded on every legal ground.