The High Court refused an Iranian asylum applicant leave to seek judicial review of a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision, finding he had not shown substantial grounds for arguing that it should be quashed.
Mr Justice Brian McGovern delivered the ruling on 25 April 2008. The applicant, identified in the judgment as A.M.R., had sought to challenge the Tribunal’s refusal of his appeal against an earlier asylum decision. The application was for leave to bring judicial review proceedings; the court did not conduct a new asylum appeal.
A.M.R. said he was Kurdish and had been associated with the Komala party, which the judgment describes as a communist group opposing the suppression of human rights in Iran. He claimed Iranian authorities raided his house on 6 February 2005 while looking for him, after which he fled with his uncle’s help. The High Court noted that there was no evidence that two detained group members had disclosed his activities to the authorities.
The Tribunal rejected his claim on credibility grounds and found he had not shown, to a reasonable degree of likelihood, that he was a refugee under the Refugee Act 1996. The High Court said the Tribunal had evidence on which it could reasonably find him not credible. It cited differences in his accounts of how his father died, concerns about incomplete identity documents, and his failure to give a satisfactory explanation for not seeking asylum during an eight-day stay in Turkey.
The applicant also argued that the Tribunal’s decision came 15 weeks after the hearing, which took place on 12 January 2006. The judge declined to treat that delay as a basis for granting leave. He said there should be no rigid rule that a decision issued more than three months after a hearing is reviewable. In this case, the delay point was absent from the statement of grounds and had been raised only briefly. The judgment said the Tribunal member had a detailed written record of the case and there was nothing to suggest the delay had hampered the decision.
The judge accepted that the Tribunal member’s comment about the timing of a mobile-phone call from A.M.R.’s wife might have been speculative, but said it did not undermine the decision as a whole. He also found the Tribunal was entitled not to hear a proposed witness from Amnesty International, who had never been to Iran and had not known A.M.R. before he arrived in Ireland.
Although the application was out of time, the judge extended the period because A.M.R. had not been told until 24 May 2006 that the Refugee Legal Service would not bring proceedings for him, and he then waited a week for a solicitor’s appointment. The court nevertheless refused leave, holding that he had failed to establish substantial grounds to challenge the Tribunal’s decision.