The High Court has refused a mother’s application to quash a decision refusing refugee status to her and her two daughters, finding no legal error in the tribunal’s assessment of her account or the country information it considered.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice David Keane on 4 July 2018, concerned a January 2016 decision of the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT), then known as the Refugee Appeals Tribunal. The tribunal had affirmed a recommendation that the applicants should not be declared refugees. The mother and daughters, whose names are anonymised in the judgment, sought judicial review and a fresh appeal before a different tribunal member.
The mother’s account was that her late husband’s family in Malawi tried to force her into another marriage and later harmed her when she refused. She said the family abducted her elder daughter, who was missing for two years and was then neglected, ill-treated and sexually abused. The applicants claimed that returning to Malawi would expose them to persecution and, for the elder daughter, female genital mutilation. These were claims presented by the applicants, not findings made by the High Court.
The court considered challenges to the tribunal’s credibility findings, including its treatment of inconsistencies in the mother’s accounts of police reports, a medical report recording a healed scar, and a police missing-person report concerning the daughter. Justice Keane concluded that the tribunal had considered the evidence and that its reasoning was open to it. He said judicial review was not an appeal on the merits.
The applicants also argued that the tribunal had failed to properly consider country-of-origin information about female genital mutilation in Malawi. The judge found that the cited passages from a US State Department report complemented rather than contradicted each other, and that the applicants had not established that the tribunal failed to consider relevant information.
The respondents had raised a preliminary objection that the judicial review was filed outside the statutory time limit. The judge held that this issue had already been dealt with when another judge extended the time limit and granted leave in April 2016. He said he had no jurisdiction to revisit that decision in the circumstances.
The court refused the application. It did not quash the tribunal decision or order a fresh determination.