The High Court quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing subsidiary protection to an anonymised applicant from Zimbabwe, ruling that the Tribunal had not applied the required analysis to its finding that he could relocate to Bulawayo.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys delivered judgment on 29 July 2016. He ordered certiorari to quash the Tribunal’s decision of 20 May 2015 and remitted the matter for reconsideration, to be heard by tribunal member Conor Gallagher if practicable. The order did not grant subsidiary protection; it required the Tribunal to reconsider the application in line with the judgment.
The applicant, identified in the judgment only as T.S.S., was born in Zimbabwe in 1987. The judgment says he had been kidnapped and beaten by government supporters in the Misulongo area. He came to Ireland in June 2008 and sought asylum. His asylum application and subsequent appeal were refused. A later application for subsidiary protection was refused by the commissioner in February 2014, and the Tribunal rejected his appeal in May 2015.
The Tribunal accepted the applicant’s credibility but found insufficient forward-looking risk of serious harm, considered internal relocation to Bulawayo available, and decided it did not need to assess state protection generally. In the judicial review, the State did not defend the finding that there was no risk of serious harm, but argued that the relocation finding independently supported the refusal.
The judge agreed that a decision maker can rely on independent grounds, and that the applicant could challenge the relocation finding despite not naming Bulawayo specifically in his notice of appeal. He also found the relocation assessment was not automatically undermined by the separate risk finding. The judgment noted evidence that the applicant’s grandmother had a house in Bulawayo and that the Tribunal had considered the city’s size and population. It rejected a separate argument that an apparent inconsistency about state protection alone invalidated the decision.
However, the Tribunal had not determined whether the alleged future harm arose from state or non-state actors. The court held that where state-sponsored harm may be involved, the decision maker must consider whether the risk is presumed to extend across the country and, if so, whether that presumption is rebutted. Where that presumption does not arise, the decision maker must still assess whether risk exists in the proposed area and whether relocation there is reasonable. Because the decision did not follow that analysis, the court quashed it.