The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting an Ethiopian woman’s asylum application, finding that material parts of the tribunal’s credibility assessment were not supported by the evidence. The case was remitted to the tribunal for a rehearing; the court did not determine whether she should receive asylum.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as S. K. and Ms. K., sought judicial review of the tribunal’s decision of 30 May 2009. She said her father, whom she described as a member of the CUD political organisation, disappeared after police took him following protests over Ethiopia’s disputed 2005 election. She also alleged that she took part in school protests, was detained with other students for about seven weeks, and was beaten and given little food.
She said she was taken from detention to hospital after being beaten unconscious and escaped through a toilet window. According to her account, she then stayed with her godparents before travelling through Kenya and an unidentified country to Ireland, arriving on 20 September 2006. These were her claims, not findings by the High Court.
The tribunal accepted that country information showed CUD members had been targeted as alleged, and that medical reports documenting post-traumatic stress disorder and back pain were consistent with her account. It nevertheless rejected her application on credibility grounds.
In reviewing that decision, Mr Justice Hogan found the tribunal had wrongly treated her descriptions of medical problems as inconsistent. The judgment noted that an initial arrival record was made without an interpreter and by officials who were not medical practitioners. It also pointed out that, in the same questionnaire the tribunal relied on, the applicant described anxiety attacks and back problems she attributed to beatings and hard labour. The judge said the Istanbul Protocol, which guides medical practitioners preparing medico-legal reports, had no relevance to interviews by social workers or the applicant’s questionnaire.
The court also found that the tribunal’s assessment of her account of school protests and detention failed to address country information describing mass detentions of children and the targeting of students in Ethiopia after the 2005 election. The judgment said this information materially supported her account and that the tribunal’s failure to address it breached principles governing credibility assessments.
The court held that the errors were material to the tribunal’s overall conclusions. It quashed and set aside the refusal and ordered a rehearing before the tribunal.