The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting N.G.’s application for refugee status, finding flaws in its assessment of key parts of her account. The case was remitted for de novo consideration by a different Tribunal member. The court did not decide whether N.G. qualifies for refugee status.
N.G. sought judicial review of the Tribunal’s November 2015 decision, which had upheld the Refugee Applications Commissioner’s recommendation not to recognise her as a refugee. At the appeal hearing, the Tribunal rejected four central claims: that she inherited her father’s farm in Malawi, sold it to a person identified as L.B., was threatened by her uncles, and that they burned her home.
N.G. said her uncles wanted the land and persecuted her after her father’s death. She said she sold her land rights in May 2013, received threats the following month and was hospitalised after her house was burned. She left Malawi in August 2013 and arrived in Ireland in September. These were her claims, not findings by the High Court.
The High Court held that the Tribunal had rejected the inheritance claim chiefly because N.G. had not produced documents proving her father’s lease or her own residence or inheritance. The Tribunal had referred to documents concerning L.B.’s interest in the land, but found them insufficient to establish that N.G. inherited it. The court said the Tribunal should also have assessed her general credibility before closing off the inheritance issue on the absence of documents, as required by the approach in Regulation 5(3) of the European Communities (Eligibility for Protection) Regulations 2006. It also should have considered information about how land rights could pass in Malawi.
The court did not overturn the Tribunal’s separate rejection of the claimed sale. It found that the Tribunal’s account of an inconsistency in N.G.’s evidence was somewhat inaccurate, but concluded that the finding was also based on her failure to obtain evidence of a transaction from L.B., despite being in contact with him, and her inability to describe the sale procedure. Those reasons were not unreasonable.
The court also found a flaw in the treatment of a police letter that N.G. submitted. The Tribunal had relied on the letter’s failure to mention threats when rejecting her account and questioning the report’s authenticity. But it did not address her explanation that she believed the police were connected to her uncles. The High Court said that explanation had to be weighed; the omission in the letter did not, by itself, necessarily make it inauthentic.
Considering the flaws together, the court held that the unchallenged finding about the sale was not enough to sustain the overall rejection. It quashed the Tribunal’s decision and ordered a fresh consideration by a different member.