The High Court has refused to quash a decision denying subsidiary protection to Lubika Madeline Bondo, rejecting her challenge to the assessment of her risk if returned to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In a judgment delivered on 9 November 2012, Mr Justice Mac Eochaidh said the central issue was whether the minister had acted irrationally in concluding that Ms Bondo had not shown substantial grounds for believing she would face serious harm on return. The court refused both grounds on which she had been granted leave to seek judicial review and refused the reliefs sought.
Ms Bondo arrived in Ireland in September 2007. Her asylum application was rejected, and she applied for subsidiary protection on 16 April 2009. The minister refused that application on 7 July 2011.
She said she had been arrested, detained and assaulted by military forces after political opponents ate at her restaurant in Lubumbashi. She also said she was arrested at a taxi rank while others distributed leaflets opposing President Kabila, then detained for two to three weeks before her release. These were her allegations; the Refugee Appeals Tribunal had found her account not credible, including the circumstances of the alleged arrests.
Her protection application relied on risks of execution and torture or inhuman or degrading treatment. It did not claim a serious threat arising from indiscriminate violence under Article 15(c) of the EU Qualification Directive. The judge noted that those personal-risk claims required her to establish a real risk of the specified harm.
The judicial review argued that the decision maker’s statement that Ms Bondo had not shown she was without protection in Congo was irrational given country information describing corruption, arbitrary arrests and other serious problems. The judge acknowledged that the decision’s wording could, at first glance, appear at odds with that information. But read as a whole, he said, the decision rested on the finding that her account of past harm was not credible and that she had not established a need for protection. In that context, the availability of state protection was not decisive.
The second ground argued that the decision maker had failed to draw conclusions about police protection from the country information. The judge rejected it for the same reason: because the alleged incidents were not accepted and no need for protection had been established, any shortcoming in assessing state protection could not undermine the refusal.
The court did not find that conditions in Congo were generally safe. It held that the challenge before it concerned Ms Bondo’s personal-risk claims and that the decision, read in its entirety, had a rational basis. The refusal of subsidiary protection therefore remained in place.