The High Court has quashed a decision refusing international protection to an Angolan man after finding that the tribunal relied on factual errors, peripheral inconsistencies and speculation when assessing his credibility.
Mr Justice Garrett Simons ruled on March 11 that the International Protection Appeals Tribunal's June 2024 decision could not safely stand. The man's appeal must now be reconsidered by a differently constituted tribunal.
The applicant, identified only as G., said his father was an activist with FLEC, the Front for the Liberation of Cabinda, and that he had also been involved with the organisation. His protection claim centred on an alleged violent attack on his family home in Angola during which, he said, his parents were killed, his wife was sexually assaulted, the house was set on fire and he was taken into custody.
The Tribunal rejected his claim after finding that his account lacked general credibility, principally because of supposed inconsistencies between his questionnaire, statutory interview and later oral evidence.
The High Court found several of those conclusions legally flawed. It held that the Tribunal had inaccurately treated G. as having confused which parent was shot, despite his consistent account that both parents died in the attack. It also found that an alleged inconsistency about when he learned the family home had been burned concerned a peripheral detail and was assessed without proper allowance for trauma and the passage of time.
Mr Justice Simons further found errors in the Tribunal's treatment of country-of-origin information, confusion over where G. had lived, and speculation about how much knowledge a low-level political party worker should have possessed.
The court also granted an extension of time because the judicial review application had been filed about five weeks late. The ruling does not grant G. refugee or subsidiary protection; it requires a fresh and lawful assessment of his appeal.