The High Court has dismissed two related judicial review applications brought by anonymised husband-and-wife applicants against decisions rejecting their international protection appeals.
The applicants, identified as N.P.B.K. and M.G.I., left the Democratic Republic of Congo on 20 May 2017 and applied for protection on arrival in Ireland. After the International Protection Office rejected their applications, they appealed to the International Protection Appeals Tribunal. The tribunal dismissed both appeals on 25 October 2019, relying mainly on credibility findings.
The applicants sought to have the tribunal decisions quashed. Their challenges focused on whether the credibility assessments were irrational or procedurally unfair, whether the tribunal had failed to consider relevant country information, and whether its conclusions could stand without specifying the weight assigned to each finding.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys said judicial review examines the lawfulness of a decision, not whether the court would reach the same factual conclusions. He found that the tribunal’s assessments were within the range open to it.
Among the matters considered by the tribunal were a membership card for the Lucha organisation dated before country information indicated the organisation had been formed, the husband’s knowledge of the organisation’s online details, and his account of an alleged prison attack and escape. The judge also referred to an inconsistency in the wife’s accounts of whether she had visited her husband in prison. He said the tribunal was entitled to assess those matters and the evidence as a whole.
The applicants also argued that the tribunal should have explained more precisely why some evidence was vague and should have put that assessment to them during the hearing. The judge rejected those arguments, finding no requirement for the decision-maker to announce an evolving assessment of testimony or to list every detail a witness could have supplied. He also found no demonstrated unfairness and no evidence that crucial country information had been ignored.
The judge said the applicants’ argument about the cumulative effect of potentially unsustainable findings did not arise because he had found no such findings. He added that a decision-maker is not required to assign a stated percentage or weight to each component of a credibility assessment.
The court dismissed both applications. It did not rehear the protection claims or make a new determination of the applicants’ eligibility for protection.