The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing subsidiary protection to a Pakistani national, finding that the tribunal failed to properly consider his family circumstances and length of residence in Ireland when deciding whether he could relocate to Lahore.
In a judgment delivered on 27 January 2017, Ms Justice Faherty ordered that the matter be remitted for a de novo hearing before a different tribunal member. The court did not itself decide whether the applicant qualified for subsidiary protection.
The applicant, anonymised in the judgment as A.A., had sought judicial review of the tribunal’s decision, which upheld a recommendation that he was not eligible for protection. The tribunal accepted that his wife’s family might seek to kill him because he had married their daughter, and found that he faced risks of execution and of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment if returned to Pakistan. It also found that Pakistani police could not effectively protect him, but concluded that he could safely and reasonably relocate to Lahore, where the threat was localised.
The applicant challenged that conclusion. He argued that his wife and children had been granted subsidiary protection on the basis of related events, and that the tribunal had failed to assess the consequences of his relocating without them. He also said it had not adequately addressed his personal circumstances or conditions in Lahore. The respondent argued that the applications were separate and that the applicant’s circumstances as a healthy, educated adult man differed from those of his wife and children.
The court rejected the argument that the different outcomes alone breached equality or fairness. It said that assessing personal circumstances could justify different relocation conclusions. It also found no error in the tribunal’s conclusion that the threat was localised and that the applicant’s in-laws were unlikely to find him in a city of Lahore’s size. The court was not persuaded that the challenge based on general conditions in Lahore had been made out.
But the court found the relocation assessment incomplete. The tribunal knew that the applicant’s wife and children had been found unable to relocate within Pakistan and had been granted subsidiary protection. His status as a husband and father of four children remained part of his personal circumstances, the judgment said, and should have been weighed when assessing whether relocation would be reasonable. The tribunal had also failed to consider how long he had lived in Ireland and to state what weight, if any, it gave that factor.
The court held that those omissions denied fair procedures and made the decision irrational. It quashed the decision and ordered a new hearing before a different tribunal member.