The High Court has refused a judicial review challenge to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s rejection of an asylum claim by an anonymised applicant from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mr Justice Cooke delivered the judgment on 25 March 2011. The applicant had been granted leave to challenge the Tribunal’s decision of 25 October 2007, which affirmed a recommendation that he should not be declared a refugee. The challenge alleged that the Tribunal was unduly influenced by inconsistencies between his account and his wife’s, and wrongly rejected medical evidence because of its credibility finding.
The applicant said he was a member of Bunda Dia Kongo, or BDK, and that he was arrested after taking part in a protest march in July 2002. He claimed he was detained for 17 months, tortured and injured before escaping from hospital and leaving for Ireland. These were claims considered in the asylum process, not findings made by the High Court.
The Tribunal had identified discrepancies between the applicant’s and his wife’s accounts of how he joined BDK. It also relied on country information that, according to the Tribunal’s decision, showed most people arrested after the march were released within two weeks, while 40 were sent to prison awaiting trial. The information also recorded an amnesty for BDK members in April 2003. The Tribunal considered those accounts inconsistent with the applicant’s claimed 17-month detention.
The High Court acknowledged an error in the Tribunal’s statement that the applicant had not mentioned rape in his asylum questionnaire. He had referred to it in an answer about why he left the DRC. The court noted, however, that he had not raised it at the section 11 interview or corrected the Tribunal member when questioned at the appeal hearing.
Mr Justice Cooke concluded that the error did not undermine the credibility assessment as a whole. He said the Tribunal’s reasoning addressed the central claim and relied principally on the claimed detention’s conflict with recorded events and the later amnesty. The court also found that the discrepancy between the spouses’ accounts of BDK membership was a matter the Tribunal could take into account.
The judgment said the medical report described scars and marks as potentially consistent with the applicant’s account, but did not say they could only have resulted from violence by another person. The court considered its corroborative value negligible in the circumstances. It said the Tribunal had not rejected the medical evidence as unreliable; it had found that the report did not make an account it disbelieved credible.
The court dismissed both grounds and refused the application for judicial review. It did not determine the asylum claim afresh.