The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing refugee status to a Pakistani applicant, finding that the Tribunal had not adequately addressed the possibility of future persecution based on his claimed Shia Muslim identity.
The judicial review concerned a Tribunal decision dated 6 April 2016. The applicant had challenged its credibility assessment and its treatment of his religion. At the hearing on 19 January 2017, the judge indicated there was no real basis to condemn the decision on the credibility ground. The applicant then proceeded only on the argument that the Tribunal had failed to consider whether he might face persecution in Pakistan because of his religion.
The Tribunal accepted that the applicant was a Pakistani national, but rejected his account of two incidents he said had prompted him to leave: a personal assault, for which he gave different dates, and the alleged killing of family members. It also identified inconsistencies about who arranged his travel to Ireland. The Tribunal found him deliberately unhelpful and uncooperative and concluded that he had not established a forward-looking well-founded fear of persecution.
The High Court considered that the Tribunal’s decision described the applicant as Shia Muslim and identified religion as central to his claim, but did not otherwise address his religion beyond references in country-of-origin information. The judge said it was unclear whether the Tribunal had accepted his claimed religious identity. If it had, the accepted facts included that he was a Shia Muslim from Pakistan; if it had not, the decision did not show that the risk claim had been assessed in light of his religion.
The judge held that, given the accepted Pakistani nationality and the ambiguity about religion, there was an element of the applicant’s account that could be true and warranted further consideration under the forward-looking persecution test. The court made an order of certiorari quashing the 6 April 2016 decision and extended time. It did not itself decide whether the applicant would face persecution or grant refugee status.