The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing refugee status to an anonymised Somali applicant, finding that the tribunal had not properly assessed conflicting language reports and part of a medical report. The case was remitted for a fresh decision by a different tribunal member.
In a judgment delivered on 15 August 2016, Ms Justice Faherty said the tribunal had not given a reasoned assessment of a De Taal language analysis submitted on the applicant’s behalf or explained how it weighed that report against an earlier Sprakab analysis. The reports gave conflicting accounts of the dialect features in the applicant’s speech. De Taal concluded that his speech had numerous features associated with the Benaadir dialects, while Sprakab said it showed features found with certainty in Northern Somalia.
The applicant claimed to be a member of the Reer Xamar clan from southern Somalia and said he had faced persecution. The tribunal accepted that he was Somali but rejected his claimed clan identity. The High Court said the tribunal’s failure to critically assess the conflicting reports meant the applicant’s core claim had not been lawfully addressed.
The court also found that the tribunal’s decision did not show what weight, if any, it gave to a SPIRASI physician’s assessment of the applicant’s mental state, which recorded anxiety, disturbed sleep, flashbacks and nightmares. The court said that assessment should have been weighed alongside the physician’s physical findings. It also criticised the tribunal’s use of a preliminary asylum interview as a comparator for alleged inconsistencies, absent a complete contradiction, and said the circumstances in which the SPIRASI history was recorded should have been considered.
Some individual findings were upheld. The judge did not fault the tribunal’s treatment of the applicant’s account of travelling to Ireland on a passport without his name or photograph, but said that issue was peripheral and could not by itself sustain the refusal. The court also found that the tribunal could take account of the fact that the applicant alone had received help from an aunt to leave Somalia, but that factor could not uphold the decision without a lawful assessment of his claimed ethnicity.
The High Court did not require a forward-looking risk assessment at this stage: the tribunal had rejected the claimed clan identity, and the court said any such assessment depended on a lawful credibility assessment. It also rejected the challenge concerning the benefit of the doubt for past persecution.
The court granted leave in the telescoped judicial review proceedings, quashed the Tribunal’s 12 May 2010 decision and ordered the matter remitted for de novo consideration by a different member. It did not decide whether the applicant qualified for refugee status.