The High Court has refused a judicial review challenge to the Minister for Justice and Equality’s refusal of subsidiary protection to an anonymised applicant who claimed to be a Rohingya from Burma and to have lived in Bangladesh.
The ruling, delivered by Mr Justice Cooke on 25 June 2012, concerned a ministerial decision dated 24 August 2011. The applicant had sought to have that decision quashed, along with declarations and an order requiring a public hearing before an independent tribunal. At the hearing, counsel accepted that those additional remedies had been addressed in later High Court judgments. The live challenge focused on whether the Minister had properly considered the claimed risk to the applicant as a Rohingya in Bangladesh.
The applicant said he had arrived in Ireland in 2008 and claimed asylum. He alleged that he was born in Burma, had fled to Bangladesh with his uncle as a young child and had lived in a UNHCR refugee camp. He also claimed that a religious group had offered him work and that he fled after overhearing a plan to sell him to terrorists in Afghanistan. The court noted that the asylum decision-makers had rejected his account as lacking credibility, including concerns about his camp documents and his knowledge of Rohingya people and refugee camps. In the judicial review, his counsel accepted that the Minister could rely on those earlier findings to reject the alleged incident with the group.
The applicant argued that, even if his claim to have lived in the camp was disbelieved, the decision did not specifically find that he was not Rohingya. He submitted that country information about discrimination and hardship faced by Rohingya people in Bangladesh required the Minister to decide whether he personally faced a real risk of degrading treatment there.
The court rejected that argument. Reading the decision as a whole, it understood the credibility concerns to relate to the claimed 15 years in a refugee camp, rather than necessarily to the applicant’s ethnicity. It also found that the determination had addressed the risk question. The court accepted that Rohingya people in Bangladesh could face economic and social difficulties, including restricted access to aid, education, movement and employment. But it held that such general hardships did not, without evidence of sufficiently severe, concerted or systematic mistreatment affecting individuals, establish serious harm in the form of inhuman or degrading treatment.
The court further found no evidential basis that this applicant had personally experienced direct mistreatment at that level because he was Rohingya. His reported complaints concerned camp conditions, food, shelter and difficulty finding work; he had given his reason for leaving Bangladesh as the need to escape the group. The court concluded that the grounds for judicial review had not been made out and refused the application. It did not quash the Minister’s decision.