The High Court refused an application for leave to seek judicial review of a 2009 decision rejecting a Georgian man’s asylum claim. The judge held that the central shortcoming was his failure to provide objective support for the consequences he feared if returned to Georgia.
The decision, delivered by Mr Justice Colm Mac Eochaidh on 22 July 2014, arose from a “telescoped” application for leave to seek judicial review. The Refugee Appeals Tribunal had decided the appeal on the papers, without an oral hearing, and affirmed the Refugee Applications Commissioner’s recommendation that refugee status be refused.
The applicant said he left Georgia in August 2008 amid conflict involving Russia, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Georgia, and feared imprisonment because he had refused military conscription on conscientious grounds. The Tribunal found his account lacked credibility, including because he had not provided information about that fear and had given conflicting accounts of how he travelled to Ireland.
The judge considered the completed asylum questionnaire, the account of the initial interview and the notice of appeal. He said the applicant described his objections to military service and trauma during the August 2008 conflict, but had not established by objective means what negative consequences might follow from failing to answer the call to military service. The judge considered this a failure to meet the forward-looking test for likely future persecution, rather than necessarily a general credibility failure. That criticism did not justify quashing the Tribunal’s decision.
The court accepted that the differences in the applicant’s travel accounts were probably peripheral and that the resulting adverse credibility finding was somewhat harsh. It also found the Tribunal’s treatment of his failure to seek asylum in other countries en route misstated the law: that could attract negative consequences only if he had claimed Ireland was the first safe country he encountered, and the judge accepted that he had made no such claim.
Those flaws did not change the outcome. The judge held that the Tribunal’s three reasons for refusing refugee status were severable, and that the first reason—the lack of objective support for the claimed future persecution—was sufficient. The court refused leave to seek judicial review; it did not grant the requested certiorari or quash the Tribunal’s decision.