The High Court has dismissed an applicant’s request for leave to appeal after it previously rejected his judicial review challenge to the refusal of international protection.
In a judgment delivered on 25 February 2019, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys considered two proposed questions the applicant said were of exceptional public importance. The court dismissed the application for leave to appeal; it did not reconsider the underlying refusal of protection.
The first proposed question concerned whether, under Article 4 of the Qualification Directive, the International Protection Appeals Tribunal had to investigate repeated assertions of mental illness where an investigation would be reasonable.
The judge said the earlier judicial review decision had rested on four grounds: the point was inadequately pleaded; it had not been raised before the tribunal; there was no evidence of actual mental illness; and the argument was without merit. The applicant had not applied to amend the pleadings, the judge said, so no question of allowing an amendment arose.
The court also rejected the applicant’s contention that the earlier judgment had ruled out any role for the State in assessing personal factors. It said the judgment distinguished country information from personal matters, for which the applicant had the primary, though not necessarily exclusive, responsibility to provide evidence. A decision-maker might have a role in seeking clarification of an applicant’s mental state in some circumstances, but a meaningful threshold had to be met. Assertions of confusion or memory problems alone did not meet it in this case, the judge said. The applicant had provided no medical evidence to the tribunal or during the judicial review, and his legal representatives had not raised or substantiated a medical issue before the tribunal.
The judge also said the case had changed substantially over time, from a challenge to a credibility assessment to an argument about a duty to investigate mental health. The Qualification Directive had not been mentioned in the applicant’s written submissions, he noted. The judge found no basis for uncertainty about the law on the shared duty to substantiate a protection claim.
The second proposed question asked whether the tribunal could rely on the absence of medical evidence when finding that the applicant’s account lacked general credibility. The judge said the applicant had made little submission on the point, which identified no specific provision of the directive. A medical claim unsupported by evidence could be treated like other evidential shortcomings, he said, adding that the issue had not been central to the earlier decision.
The application for leave to appeal was dismissed.