The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing a Congolese woman’s asylum appeal and sent her case back for a fresh hearing before a different tribunal member.
Mr Justice McDermott ruled that the tribunal’s decision was fundamentally flawed because it gave disproportionate weight to credibility concerns without adequately assessing the woman’s future risk of persecution as a Tutsi.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as R. T. (DRC), arrived in Ireland in December 2007. She said she had fled persecution and violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The tribunal accepted that she was Tutsi and that she and her family had suffered persecution before leaving Kinshasa in 1998. It did not accept her account of living in the North Kivu area for years or the events she said led to her departure from there.
The tribunal refused her appeal in 2009. It found that her limited knowledge of the area where she said she had lived, and of the conflict there, undermined her account. It also concluded that being Tutsi did not automatically establish a risk of persecution, and that internal relocation to Kinshasa was a viable option for her.
The High Court said it was not an appeal court and that it had been open to the tribunal to reject the disputed parts of her account. It also found no error in the tribunal’s assessment of her claim that she faced persecution as a failed asylum seeker. The court’s concern was the separate assessment of future risk.
The judgment said the tribunal should have considered the accepted evidence of persecution the applicant experienced as a child, the history of attacks against Tutsis, and continuing prejudice and discrimination. It also found the tribunal’s general conclusion about the relative safety of Tutsis in Kinshasa unreasonable in light of evidence that the small Tutsi community there included prominent people able to secure protection. The applicant, the court noted, would return alone without the benefit of status or prominence.
The court granted an order of certiorari quashing the tribunal’s refusal and remitted the matter for hearing by a different member. It did not decide that the applicant should be granted refugee status; the tribunal must reconsider her case.