The High Court has granted a Moldovan applicant leave to seek judicial review on one ground challenging the procedure for applying for subsidiary protection. The ruling does not decide whether the refusal was unlawful: it permits the applicant to pursue that single argument.
The application concerned a Minister’s decision of 3 April 2012 refusing subsidiary protection. The court’s ruling, delivered by Mr Justice Cooke on 31 July 2012, was confined to an ex parte application for leave in relation to that refusal. A separate, on-notice judicial review application concerned a deportation order dated 5 May 2012 and was outside the scope of this ruling.
The applicant’s protection claim relied on his account that his wife, a member of Moldova’s Democratic Party, had tried to publish an article implicating the then president’s son in illegal drug and alcohol trading. He alleged that he was assaulted, that the family received threats, and that men tried to abduct his wife. The asylum claim had been rejected largely on credibility grounds. The subsidiary protection application relied on the same events.
The judge said the Minister was entitled, and obliged, to find the account not credible. He noted that no new facts or evidence had been presented, the article had not been published or produced, and the wife had not apparently been asked to explain its contents. The court stressed that it was not itself making findings on the underlying facts or credibility. Given the conclusion that the alleged past events had not happened, it found no legal duty to consider other aspects of the claim further. It also said country information had no material bearing on the determination’s treatment of those alleged events.
The court rejected several other grounds as unarguable, including claims of excessive delay, failure to cooperate, bias or prejudgment, and inadequate examination. It said the general assertion of inadequate examination was too vague to amount to a valid judicial review ground.
Leave was granted only on the argument that linking the subsidiary protection application to the deportation procedure could impose a precondition or disadvantage incompatible with EU law. Under the procedure described in the judgment, a failed asylum seeker was invited to apply within a 15-day period after notification of a proposed deportation order. The court allowed that legal question to proceed; it made no final ruling on its merits.