The High Court has dismissed a Nigerian man’s judicial review challenge to a decision refusing to recognise him as a refugee, and refused leave to apply for certiorari.
Mr Justice Eagar gave judgment on 17 September 2015. The application sought to quash the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s decision of 6 November 2012, which had affirmed the refusal of the Refugee Applications Commissioner. The applicant also sought a declaration that the statutory time limit for bringing the challenge did not comply with EU law. The court’s stated orders were to refuse leave to apply for certiorari and dismiss the application.
The applicant said his claim arose from attacks he attributed to Boko Haram in Nigeria. He described a bomb attack on a church in February 2012 and said that, the following night, intruders killed his wife at their home while he hid. He said he later received threatening messages, moved between locations, and found his apartment damaged after another church attack. These were his claims as recounted in the Tribunal proceedings; the judgment does not make independent findings that the attacks occurred as described.
The Tribunal had rejected the claim, citing credibility concerns and concluding that the material before it did not establish a lack of state protection in Nigeria. Among its concerns were the applicant’s limited detail about the church attack, inconsistencies in his account of the intruders, and the absence of saved threatening messages or other documentation about his wife’s alleged death. It also relied on his ability to move between places without personal encounters with alleged persecutors and his failure to seek help from the authorities.
In the judicial review, the applicant argued that the Tribunal’s credibility findings were irrational and that it had failed to engage properly with his appeal submissions and country of origin information. The respondents submitted that the decision rested on a series of credibility findings and that the state-protection analysis was also open to the Tribunal.
The High Court said its role was not to reassess credibility but to determine whether the decision-making process was legally sound and free of material error. It found that the Tribunal had set out its credibility reasons clearly, and that those reasons were based on facts with a legitimate connection to the adverse findings, rather than instinct or speculation. The court also concluded that the Tribunal had considered country of origin information and that no specific information had been pressed before the court to show its decision was incorrect.
The ruling addressed the legality of the Tribunal’s decision on judicial review. It did not itself determine the truth of the applicant’s account of events in Nigeria or grant refugee status.