The High Court has refused a Pakistani woman’s application for judicial review of a decision rejecting her refugee appeal, finding that the tribunal’s conclusions on state protection and relocation were not unreasonable.
In a judgment delivered on 5 November 2014, Mr Justice McDermott said the applicant had not shown that the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s decision was fundamentally flawed. She had sought an order quashing the tribunal’s 28 September 2009 decision, which upheld the refusal to recommend that she receive refugee status.
The applicant, identified as S.K., said she fled Pakistan with her young son because she feared Taliban aggression against her family. She said her husband had been attacked and later disappeared, and that her father’s home in Gomal was attacked, killing several people. She attributed the attack and her husband’s disappearance to the Taliban. These were claims described in the judgment; the court did not make findings that the Taliban carried out those acts.
The tribunal accepted her credibility as to her belief that the Taliban had targeted her husband, but found that protection was available from Pakistani authorities and that she had relocated successfully to Lahore and Karachi. It also concluded that the difficulties she described in those cities—including problems enrolling her son in school and suspicion from neighbours—did not amount to persecution.
On state protection, the High Court distinguished conditions in Waziristan from those in Gomal, which it said was outside that region. It found no evidence that police had failed to investigate the attack at Gomal, noting that an extensive report had been prepared, although the perpetrators had not been brought to justice for more than 12 months. The court accepted that state protection was unavailable to the applicant in Waziristan, but was satisfied that protection had been available to her family after the attack in Gomal. It therefore rejected the challenge to the tribunal’s conclusion about protection outside Waziristan.
The applicant also argued that the tribunal had applied the wrong legal test by asking whether relocation would be “very difficult”. The High Court considered the tribunal’s decision in context and concluded it had assessed whether it would be unduly harsh for her and her son to remain in Lahore or Karachi. The judgment referred to her having lived openly in Lahore for eight months, with no apparent knowledge of her whereabouts by the Taliban, and found that the tribunal had considered both the general conditions in those cities and her personal circumstances.
The application for judicial review was refused. The court did not grant the requested order quashing the tribunal’s decision.