The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by D.T. in a refugee case, concluding that it could not decide the certified legal question while significant conflicts remained about his identity and nationality. The Court did not dismiss the proceedings as an abuse of process and did not determine whether D.T. was Bhutanese, Nepalese or stateless.
D.T. said he was born in Bhutan to Bhutanese parents, was of Nepalese extraction and had fled to Nepal in 1990. He claimed he returned to Bhutan in January 2010, was detained there and escaped before travelling to Ireland, where he sought refugee status. The Refugee Appeals Tribunal found him stateless and treated Nepal as his country of former habitual residence. It concluded he had not shown a risk of persecution there and also found he lacked personal credibility.
The High Court refused D.T. leave to seek judicial review, but certified a point of law for appeal: whether a person whose citizenship was arbitrarily denied should be assessed as a national of that state or as stateless. The Supreme Court appeal concerned that question.
During the appeal, information from the UK Home Office linked D.T.’s fingerprints to records for a person identified as R.C., a Nepalese national who had been issued UK visas and was recorded as arriving at Heathrow in 2009. The Tribunal argued that the new information showed D.T. had given a false account and sought dismissal of the proceedings as an abuse of process.
D.T. denied being R.C. He said he had used that name as an alias in Nepal and that an agent arranged documents and visas. His explanations changed across affidavits about when he met the agent, what passport was used and whether he knew about the visa applications. He attributed some discrepancies to translation difficulties and maintained that he was a Bhutanese national and stateless.
Justice Dunne said she was sceptical about aspects of D.T.’s accounts, but found the affidavit evidence was significantly disputed and could not be resolved fairly in the motion proceedings. She said a plenary hearing with oral evidence and cross-examination would be needed to test the conflicts.
Because the certified legal question depended on resolving whether D.T. was Bhutanese or Nepalese, the Court declined to answer it as a potentially hypothetical question. It dismissed the appeal on that basis, rather than for abuse of process. The judgment noted that D.T. could pursue an application under section 22 of the International Protection Act 2015, where the factual conflicts could be explored.