The High Court has refused an Angolan woman’s application for judicial review of the Minister for Justice and Equality’s refusal of her subsidiary protection application. The court held that the grounds for which she had been granted leave to seek review were not made out.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as V. P. F. [Cabinda/Angola], said she was from Cabinda and had supported the Front for the Liberation of Cabinda (FLEC), a separatist organisation. She claimed she had been arrested, detained, tortured and raped in 2006, and later suspended from her teaching job. Those were claims in her protection applications; the judgment does not make findings that the alleged events occurred.
Her asylum claim was rejected by the Refugee Applications Commissioner and, on appeal, by the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, which disbelieved aspects of her personal history. She arrived in Ireland in April 2007. She applied for subsidiary protection in March 2010, arguing that she faced serious harm because of actual or perceived FLEC association, her gender and Cabindan background, past sexual assault, and her status as a failed asylum seeker. The Minister refused that application by letter dated 7 April 2011.
The applicant argued that the Minister should have given her an opportunity to respond before reaching a different conclusion about risk to FLEC supporters. She also challenged the reliance on the Tribunal’s credibility findings about the 2006 attack and her lack of information about three friends, and argued that the absence of an appeal with an oral hearing breached the EU principle of equivalence.
Mr Justice Cooke found that the Tribunal had not made the risk conclusion attributed to it. It had rejected the applicant’s asylum claim principally because it did not believe she had been a FLEC supporter or sympathiser. The Minister, by contrast, addressed the protection claim on the assumption that her claimed association might be accepted, but concluded from country information that conditions had improved and the risk to a non-fighting sympathiser no longer existed. The court said that conclusion was open to the Minister on the material considered and that there was no obligation to consult the applicant before reaching it.
The court said the challenged credibility matters would not justify quashing the decision because they were not material to the Minister’s central conclusion about current risk. It also noted that the Minister had addressed the applicant’s additional claims based on gender, past sexual assault and Cabindan background, and those matters were not among the grounds granted leave. The court declined to reconsider the appeal-mechanism argument, referring to earlier High Court judgments. It refused the judicial review application.