The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting a Nigerian man’s claim for refugee status, finding that six of the tribunal’s ten credibility findings were unlawful.
The judicial review concerned a tribunal decision that had affirmed a recommendation that the applicant not be declared a refugee. The appeal had been decided on written submissions, without an oral hearing. The court did not decide whether the applicant is entitled to refugee status or whether he faces a future risk of persecution.
The applicant said he was gay and that members of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta attacked and threatened him because of his sexuality. He also said Nigerian police failed to help him after an attack because he was gay. These were his claims; the High Court did not make findings that the events occurred.
The tribunal rejected his account on ten credibility grounds. The High Court accepted four findings as rational, concerning his delay in applying for asylum, inability to give the address where he said he had lived, his account of obtaining a tourist visa, and the unreported loss or theft of his passport.
But the court found six findings unlawful. Among other things, the tribunal had assumed he wanted to connect with Dublin’s gay community, criticised him for not knowing the location of a bar he had not said he visited, and treated his lack of contact with gay support groups as undermining his claim. The court said those conclusions involved assumptions or speculation, particularly given there had been no oral hearing and the relevant explanations had not been explored.
The court also found the tribunal misunderstood the applicant’s evidence about police: he had said officers failed to help him because he was gay, rather than that they ignored his sexuality. It found the rejection of his account of M.E.N.D.’s motive and the reliance on country information that did not describe M.E.N.D. as anti-gay were also flawed.
The judge concluded that the lawful findings could not realistically be separated from the unlawful ones because the latter rejected a central part of the claim. The tribunal’s decision was therefore quashed. The matter was not determined on its merits, and the court said a future-risk assessment would depend on a proper credibility assessment. It did not decide the separate constitutional challenge to section 16 of the Refugee Act 1996 or the related procedural issue.