The High Court has ordered the subsidiary protection refusals in a judicial review case involving three anonymised applicants to be quashed, finding that the Minister’s reasoning on country information did not comply with the applicable EU directive.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys delivered judgment on 20 April 2018. The applicants had sought asylum in January 2007. Their application was rejected in August that year, and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal refused their appeals in July 2009. A subsidiary protection application made in September 2009 was refused in April 2012. Deportation orders were also made, but had since been revoked, so the court said a challenge to those orders no longer arose.
The applicants sought certiorari of the subsidiary protection refusal. The judgment records that the Minister rejected their account as not credible and, on that basis, found they had not already suffered serious harm. The judge held that this was a legitimate approach on the facts as found; he said a narrative consideration of country material was not necessary to that particular finding.
However, the applicants also relied on a risk of communal violence independent of their specific account. The decision said both that all papers on file had been considered and that consideration of the relevant regulation on country-of-origin facts was “not applicable”. The judge described those statements as somewhat contradictory. He said country information should be considered where it could independently point to serious harm, even if an applicant’s account was rejected as incredible.
The court concluded that it could not say with complete confidence that considering the country material would make no difference. It found the Minister’s reasoning process in this instance was not in accordance with the directive and ordered certiorari removing the subsidiary protection refusals for the purpose of being quashed.
The judge separately described the two-and-a-half-year processing delay as unfortunate and said it should not be repeated. He nevertheless held that the delay did not, by itself, make the refusal invalid.