The High Court has quashed a 2009 decision refusing refugee status to an anonymised applicant from Cameroon and ordered the case returned to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal for reconsideration by a different member.
In a judgment delivered on 18 April 2013, Mr Justice Colm Mac Eochaidh formally granted leave to seek judicial review and, because the hearing was conducted on a “telescoped” basis, also made an order of certiorari quashing the refusal. The court directed that the matter be reconsidered. It did not decide whether the applicant qualified for refugee status.
The applicant had arrived in Ireland via France on 22 April 2008 and applied for refugee status that day. He said he feared persecution in Cameroon because of his membership of the opposition Social Democratic Front (SDF), where he claimed to have organised young people for protests. He also claimed he had been arrested and detained, threatened with death, escaped with help and remained in hiding before leaving Cameroon.
The Tribunal’s refusal relied primarily on adverse credibility findings. The High Court found that several involved peripheral matters, including the applicant’s travel and passport. It held that the Tribunal had wrongly relied on section 11B of the Refugee Act 1996 when criticising his failure to seek asylum in France: the applicant had not claimed Ireland was the first safe country he reached. The court said there was no general legal rule requiring an asylum seeker to explain why they did not claim asylum in the first safe country encountered.
The court also found irrational the Tribunal’s reasoning that the applicant’s two months in hiding at his aunt’s house undermined his fear because he might have been discovered. The Tribunal’s remaining credibility findings did not clearly resolve the central claim about his SDF membership and involvement. The judge further found that the assessment did not adequately consider the claim in the context of country-of-origin information about political events and risk to some SDF members.
A separate issue concerned the applicant’s claimed SDF membership card. The Tribunal had noted a date on the card that differed from the applicant’s account of when he joined, and referred to document fraud in Cameroon, but did not raise its concerns with him. The High Court found that this denied him a reasonable opportunity to respond and that the Tribunal had not given an adequate reason for discounting the document.
The court concluded that the applicant had established substantial grounds for the challenge. The order was for the refusal to be quashed and the application reconsidered by a different Tribunal member.