The High Court has refused an Afghan man’s application for judicial review of a decision refusing his asylum appeal. The court declined to quash the Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision and refused the other reliefs he sought.
The Tribunal had refused his appeal against a recommendation that he should not be declared a refugee. The man asked the High Court to set that decision aside and to declare that the asylum procedures had not provided an effective remedy under European Union and human rights law.
His claim was that the Taliban had forced him to transport weapons and provide information about a local commander in Helmand Province. He said he was held for 15 days and had his arm broken, then moved within Afghanistan because he feared the Taliban. He also claimed his family’s farm was confiscated and that his brother-in-law was beaten for information about him. These were the man’s claims as recounted in the judgment, not findings by the High Court.
The Refugee Appeals Tribunal had rejected his account on credibility grounds. Its concerns included his account of Taliban recruitment of a Hazara in the 1990s, whether he could have stopped working for the Taliban and left, his account of approaching British forces, discrepancies between his interview and an identity document, and his claim that he could not safely relocate within Afghanistan.
The man argued that the Tribunal had relied on conjecture, failed to address relevant material and had not properly considered his evidence on internal relocation and the risk he faced. The respondents defended the decision, saying its findings were supported by the evidence and country of origin information.
Justice Stewart said the High Court’s role on judicial review was to examine whether the decision-making process was legally sound, not to replace the Tribunal’s assessment with its own. She rejected the challenges to the Tribunal’s first credibility finding, including the argument that it failed to consider a newspaper article. The Tribunal had identified the country of origin information it preferred, and was not required to list and discount every item of evidence, she said.
The judge also found that the Tribunal’s second and third findings were reasoned assessments rather than impermissible conjecture. The identity-document discrepancy directly contradicted the man’s account of his background, and he had offered no explanation for it, the judgment said. On relocation, the Tribunal had considered factors including Kabul’s distance from Helmand, the city’s social and political make-up, and the man’s ability to relocate.
The court did not decide the asylum claim afresh. It concluded that the challenges did not establish that the Tribunal had acted unlawfully or made an error warranting judicial review. The High Court refused all the reliefs sought.