The High Court granted Mabel Imafu leave to pursue two grounds of a judicial review challenge to a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing her refugee status. It rejected her challenge to the Tribunal’s basic credibility finding and did not decide whether the refusal should ultimately be quashed.
In a judgment delivered on 27 May 2005, Mr Justice Clarke said Imafu had established substantial grounds to argue that the Tribunal failed to consider country of origin information and did not adequately explain its finding that she had failed to make every effort to substantiate her account. He adjourned the matter so she could submit a revised grounding notice setting out the grounds on which leave had been granted.
Imafu, a Nigerian citizen, arrived in Ireland in April 2003 with her son and applied for asylum. Her initial account to the Refugee Applications Commissioner concerned religious difficulties in Nigeria. Before her appeal hearing, she told her solicitors that she had been trafficked to Italy, beaten and threatened, and forced into prostitution in Naples over a debt she said was 6,000 naira. The judgment records that the Tribunal set aside her evidence given before the hearing and assessed the later account.
The Tribunal refused her claim after finding her account not credible. It cited her responses to difficult questions, including occasions when it said she answered a different question. The High Court held there was a sufficient basis for that finding to defeat the challenge on the “pure credibility” ground. It said the court could not replace the Tribunal’s assessment with its own.
The judge found, however, that the Tribunal’s decision did not make clear whether it considered reports cited by Imafu about trafficking for prostitution from Edo State to Italy, Nigeria’s enforcement of anti-trafficking treaties, and possible prosecution of trafficking victims returned to Nigeria. He said it was arguable that country information must be considered as part of assessing credibility, while stressing that consistency with such information would not itself prove an account true.
The judgment also found no adequate analysis behind the Tribunal’s statement that Imafu had not made every effort to substantiate her story. The judge said such a finding required a rational explanation addressing what substantiation could reasonably have been expected, any perceived failure to provide it, and any reasons offered for being unable to do so.
The ruling was at the leave stage under the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking) Act 2000. It permitted the challenge to proceed on the context and substantiation grounds only; it was not a final determination of the judicial review or an order quashing the asylum decision.