The High Court quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting an Iraqi man’s asylum appeal and directed that a fresh appeal be heard by a different decision maker.
In a judgment delivered on 14 March 2013, Ms Justice M. H. Clark found that the Tribunal had made adverse credibility findings about parts of the man’s account without deciding whether his central fear of persecution was well founded. The court said the decision focused on peripheral issues rather than assessing whether he would face risk in Iraq because of his father’s past.
The man, identified in the judgment as K. N. Q. [IRAQ], said he was Kurdish and from Kirkuk. He claimed his father had been a senior Ba’ath Party military figure, had received threats, and was killed in an attack in October 2006 in which the applicant was also injured. He said he later received threats and feared being targeted because of his family connection. These were claims before the Tribunal, not findings that the High Court made about the underlying events.
The Tribunal had rejected his account, citing matters including differences in how he described his father’s work, when he identified Al Qaeda as among those behind the threats, his family’s actions after the attack, and his failure to seek asylum in Turkey. It also gave little weight to medical and other documents. The respondents argued that the Tribunal’s credibility findings were rational, that it had considered the relevant material, and that delay in issuing its decision was partly due to efforts to obtain a better translation of a death certificate.
The High Court said the applicant’s identity, Kurdish ethnicity and age appeared to have been accepted by the Tribunal. It criticised the use of statements from an initial interview conducted when he was treated as an adult, despite the Tribunal’s recognition that he was a minor, and found no evidence that the benefit of the doubt had been applied in practice. The judgment also expressed serious concerns about the age assessment and the fairness of the appeal hearing.
The court said the challenge before it concerned the Tribunal’s decision, not the earlier age assessment by the Refugee Applications Commissioner, and it could not quash that assessment in these proceedings. It found that arguments about delay and the lack of medical treatment in Iraq were not persuasive on their own. The order was to quash the Tribunal decision and hold a fresh appeal before a different decision maker, who must be told why the earlier decision was quashed.