The High Court quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing asylum to an anonymised applicant after finding that country of origin reports used to question a polling card were not provided to her for a response.
In an ex tempore judgment delivered on 17 December 2015, Mr Justice Colm Mac Eochaidh held that the Tribunal had to share information about the availability of forged identity documents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo because it formed part of the reasoning used to reject the card’s authenticity.
The applicant relied on the polling card to support her claim that she came from a particular area of the DRC. The Tribunal said it knew of reports describing how easily fake identity cards and other documents could be obtained there, and that little weight could be attached to the card. It also found that the applicant was not from the area she claimed. The judge concluded that, taken together, those findings amounted to a rejection of the card as a forgery.
Under section 16(8) of the Refugee Act 1996, the Tribunal was required to provide the applicant with country information reports relevant to that issue, giving her an opportunity to respond to the suggestion that the card was forged. The judge said the reports had not been supplied and that this failure vitiated the decision. He quashed it, despite upholding the Tribunal’s separate negative credibility findings as carefully explained and legally sustainable.
The applicant had also challenged the refusal to allow an academic to attend the private asylum hearing alongside her lawyers. The judge said the Tribunal may have interpreted the statutory privacy rule too strictly, but did not decide the rule’s proper meaning. He found no evidence explaining what support the academic would provide or showing that her absence harmed the applicant or affected the decision-making process. That ground therefore failed.