The High Court refused an asylum applicant leave to seek judicial review of a decision that any appeal to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal would be decided without an oral hearing.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as A.W., is a Pakistani national who said the Taliban had tried to extort money from him and threatened to kill him if he did not pay. The Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner (ORAC) rejected his application, citing credibility concerns and concluding that, even if his account were true, the alleged threats were financially motivated and did not establish a refugee claim under the statutory grounds.
ORAC’s credibility concerns included the time the applicant remained in Pakistan after the alleged threats, inconsistencies about travel to the UK and whether he was present for his daughter’s birth, his evasion of a transfer to the UK, and differences between accounts given in two interviews. ORAC also considered that internal relocation was possible and that the applicant had not shown a lack of state protection in Pakistan. These were ORAC’s conclusions, not findings made by the High Court about the truth of the asylum account.
The applicant argued that section 13 of the Refugee Act 1996 would unlawfully deprive him of an oral hearing on appeal because ORAC had found his account not credible. The judge accepted the reasoning in an earlier case that an oral appeal may be required where the first decision turns on personal credibility, such as demeanour or the way testimony is delivered.
But the judge said the adverse credibility assessment here rested on inconsistencies, implausibility and documentary material, rather than demeanour. The applicant had not identified what advantage he would gain by repeating the same evidence orally. His written submissions raised complaints about how ORAC assessed his evidence, the burden of proof on state protection, and internal relocation, but the judge said those points did not explain why an oral hearing was needed.
The court refused leave because substantial grounds for the challenge had not been established. The ruling concerned access to an oral appeal hearing at this procedural stage; it did not determine whether the applicant qualified for refugee protection or the merits of his asylum claim.