The High Court refused a minor’s application for leave to seek judicial review over the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s refusal to adjourn her asylum appeal hearing in 2010. The court said she had not described what new evidence could have been submitted or what prejudice followed from the refusal.
The sole complaint was that refusing an adjournment breached fair procedures. At the start of the hearing on 23 November 2010, the applicant’s representatives said they needed time to obtain a language analysis report concerning her mother’s dialect. The proposed report was intended to support the mother’s claim to Bajuni ethnicity and Somali nationality. The applicant did not argue that the Tribunal’s decision was irrational.
The Tribunal refused the adjournment, saying the mother’s asylum claim had already been heard and was not being reopened in the child’s appeal. It also said the applicant’s solicitors had had time to seek a report after taking on the case in June 2010. The child’s appeal notice, filed that month, contained 22 grounds but did not challenge the language analysis used in the mother’s earlier asylum case.
That earlier analysis, obtained during the mother’s asylum assessment, concluded that she did not speak a Bajuni dialect of Swahili found in Somalia and instead used language typical of a variety spoken in Kenya. The mother did not submit a competing report during her own asylum assessment. The Tribunal rejected her claim in March 2009; that decision was not challenged by judicial review.
The court also noted that the mother later applied for humanitarian leave to remain and subsidiary protection, and had a further opportunity to make submissions when responsibility for processing subsidiary protection claims transferred in October 2013. No new language report was submitted or sought in support of those applications. The judge said that history suggested a lack of seriousness about the adjournment request.
The judge held that a claimant alleging unfair exclusion of evidence must describe the substance of that evidence and the prejudice caused by its exclusion. As neither had been established, the court found the point without merit and refused leave to seek judicial review. It did not determine the underlying asylum claim. The judge asked to be addressed on whether a wasted costs order should be made; the judgment does not record a decision on that question.