The High Court has dismissed a judicial review challenging the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s rejection of an Albanian man’s asylum appeal, finding no legal error in the tribunal’s assessment of his credibility or its consideration of country information.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys delivered the judgment on 30 May 2018. The applicant sought an order quashing the tribunal’s decision of 15 September 2016. The court dismissed the application on its merits and said it did not need to decide a separate request for an extension of time.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as M.S. (Albania), was born in Albania in 1995 and arrived in Ireland on 14 December 2014. He claimed asylum, saying he had received death threats after seeking to end a relationship with a woman, allegedly from her family. The Refugee Applications Commission rejected his application on credibility grounds in May 2015. The tribunal later rejected his appeal, also on credibility grounds.
The court considered complaints about the standard of proof, the tribunal’s handling of the applicant’s difficulty recalling dates, its credibility assessment, its treatment of country of origin information and whether its decision was uncertain. On the standard-of-proof grounds, the judgment said the applicant’s submissions accepted that related issues had already been decided against his position in an earlier case.
The judge said the tribunal had considered the reasons offered for the applicant’s difficulty recalling dates. He also noted the tribunal’s concerns about his evidence, including his inability to give the date of a threatening encounter, contradictory accounts of how threats were made, inconsistencies about when he left Albania, and an account the tribunal described as evasive. The judgment said the tribunal member had seen and heard the applicant and was best placed to assess his credibility; the conclusions were lawful and open to the tribunal.
On country information, the court said the material about forced marriages by women and girls did not particularly support the applicant’s claim. The tribunal had expressly considered the material and was entitled to conclude that, given its findings on credibility, it did not need further discussion. The court rejected the argument that the decision was uncertain, saying a decision-maker did not have to analyse every point in further detail after generally rejecting credibility.
The court dismissed the application. It made no determination on the extension-of-time issue.