The High Court has refused an asylum seeker’s judicial review challenge to a decision rejecting his refugee claim, concluding that the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s credibility assessment could not be interfered with.
In a judgment delivered on 25 February 2010, Mr Justice Cooke said the Tribunal’s decision contained ambiguities and its reasoning on internal relocation was inadequate. But he found that a balanced reading of the decision made sufficiently clear that the Tribunal member had disbelieved the full basis of the applicant’s claim.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as S. B. E., said he had lived in Onitsha, Nigeria, with his wife and daughter and run a store. He claimed that violence in Anambra state in June and July 2006 led to his store being vandalised and his goods stolen, and that his wife was kidnapped and held for ransom. He said police did not help, and that his wife escaped with assistance from a friend’s contact. The judgment records that the applicant later travelled to Ireland and claimed asylum.
The section 13 report accepted that his description of the wider violence, clashes with police and attacks attributed to the Movement for a Sovereign Biafra was supported by country-of-origin information. The Tribunal nevertheless rejected his claim. It questioned, among other things, why he had left 400,000 Naira with his mother while his wife was allegedly held for ransom, and how he travelled without knowing his destination.
The court said the Tribunal had not expressly stated whether the alleged store loss and kidnapping had happened, creating uncertainty about what it accepted as the “crisis” that prompted the applicant to leave. It also criticised the Tribunal’s brief view that he could relocate elsewhere in Nigeria: no destination had been identified, and the decision did not assess whether relocation would be safe, feasible or reasonable for him and his family.
However, the judge said the relocation issue did not undermine the outcome. The court read the Tribunal’s decision as accepting that general unrest and violence occurred in Anambra, while disbelieving that the applicant had been directly caught up in it. It also found the Tribunal was entitled to consider the applicant’s lack of identification documents and his account of travelling without them when assessing credibility.
The court stressed that credibility was for the Tribunal to decide and that its own task was to review the legality of the process, not substitute its view. It observed that appeal decisions should clearly identify the reasons for disbelieving an applicant, and said review or proofreading of draft decisions would be desirable. The application was refused.