The High Court dismissed a judicial review challenge to a 2007 decision of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, finding that the Tribunal had addressed the applicant’s claim to Bhutanese nationality and had rejected it. The court held that the ground for which leave had been granted was not sustained.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as T. B. K., had been born in Bhutan and lived there until he was 23. He said he and his family were of Nepalese ethnicity, had farmed land in Bhutan, and were deprived of citizenship after changes to nationality laws. He said he was arrested, beaten and tortured after protesting, then released in 1992 on condition that he leave Bhutan and not return. He, his family and his father went to a United Nations refugee camp in Nepal, where they lived thereafter.
The applicant said he later faced threats from Maoist activists in Nepal and left for Ireland in 2006, claiming asylum on 21 June that year. An Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner report recommended that he not be declared a refugee. It treated him as stateless and assessed his claim by reference to Nepal, his former habitual residence. The Refugee Appeals Tribunal upheld that recommendation on 27 August 2007.
The judicial review focused on whether the Tribunal had failed to consider the applicant’s “primary claim” that he remained a Bhutanese national and had been expelled because of persecution linked to his ethnicity. The High Court examined the appeal notice and additional submissions. It found that the notice had expressly presented the claim as one by a stateless person fearing persecution in Nepal, while later submissions advanced several possible ways to assess the claim, including Bhutanese nationality and former habitual residence in Bhutan or Nepal.
The court concluded that the Tribunal had recorded the applicant’s account and the competing submissions. It had found that he was stateless and that Nepal was his former habitual residence, then assessed whether he would face persecution if returned there. The High Court held that the statelessness finding necessarily rejected the claim that he had retained Bhutanese nationality, and that this finding was open to the Tribunal on the evidence before it.
The court therefore dismissed the judicial review application. It did not itself determine the applicant’s refugee status; it ruled that the challenged Tribunal decision had not failed to engage with the nationality claim.