The High Court has quashed an International Protection Appeals Tribunal decision excluding a Russian applicant from international protection on the basis of an alleged serious non-political crime. The case was remitted to a differently constituted division of the tribunal for reconsideration.
In a judgment delivered on 25 May 2023, Mr Justice Garrett Simons found that the tribunal had failed to identify adequately the crime or crimes it considered the applicant had committed. Without doing so, it could not properly assess whether an offence was serious and non-political or whether the applicant bore individual responsibility, he said.
The tribunal had accepted that the applicant had a well-founded fear of persecution in Russia on grounds including religion, imputed political opinion and membership of a particular social group. It found that suspected members of the named organisation, Imarat Caucasus, faced risks including torture, imprisonment and murder by the authorities. It nevertheless concluded there were serious reasons to consider that the applicant had committed, incited or participated in a serious non-political crime before arriving in Ireland.
The applicant alleged that Russia’s Federal Security Service had falsely accused him of travelling to Syria and belonging to the organisation after he failed to cooperate with it. He said the documents he submitted were genuine records generated during criminal proceedings, but that the allegations within them were fabricated. Those were the applicant’s claims, not findings by the High Court.
The tribunal relied on documents from Russian authorities, including a list relating to alleged extremist activity, a search warrant and a resolution initiating a criminal case. The judge said those documents did not adequately identify the alleged offence or establish the applicant’s individual role. A search warrant and the initiation of criminal proceedings reflected procedural stages with evidential thresholds below those required to establish criminal liability, he said. The tribunal had wrongly treated the documents, without distinguishing their status, as “clear and reliable information”.
The judgment also criticised the tribunal’s failure to consider adequately the applicant’s contention that the criminal case had been fabricated, given its own finding that he faced persecution from Russian authorities. It said the tribunal had not properly considered whether the prosecution itself might amount to discriminatory persecution. The judge also rejected reliance on alleged failures by the applicant to cooperate as shifting the burden of proving the exclusion grounds, which rested with the state authorities.
The court held that the same failure to identify a specific crime invalidated the tribunal’s exclusion decision concerning subsidiary protection. It made an order of certiorari setting aside the tribunal’s decision and remitted the matter to a differently constituted division. The judge’s provisional view was that the applicant should recover his costs; the respondents could seek a different costs order by contacting the registrar within 14 days, with a view to a hearing on 19 June 2023.