The High Court has dismissed a judicial review challenge by an Albanian applicant who said he feared persecution because of his sexual orientation.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Richard Humphreys on 4 June 2019, concerned an International Protection Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting the applicant’s appeals against refusals of refugee and subsidiary protection. The court’s role was to decide whether the tribunal’s decision was unlawful or one that was not open to it. It did not reconsider the protection application itself.
The applicant, born in 1997, had described violence, harassment, bullying, intimidation, name-calling and stone-throwing in Albania. The tribunal acknowledged those experiences but found they did not amount to persecution or establish a real risk of future persecution. It said the applicant could face some ostracism depending on where he settled. It also considered state protection available; the High Court described that as a subsidiary, essentially obiter finding. The tribunal made no specific finding on internal relocation, though it considered ostracism would be less in urban areas.
The applicant challenged the tribunal’s findings as unfair, erroneous or irrational, argued that its reasoning was confused, and alleged irrational or selective use of country reports. The High Court rejected each ground. It said no specific basis for unfairness had been demonstrated, and that a decision is not irrational merely because it is not the most favourable to the applicant. The question was whether the tribunal’s conclusion was one a reasonable decision-maker could reach.
The court said the legal threshold for persecution requires treatment of sufficient severity under the relevant refugee law. Discrimination or difficulty alone does not meet that threshold, though multiple measures may need to be considered together in the circumstances of a case. On the evidence before it, the court found the tribunal was entitled to conclude that the adverse treatment did not amount to persecution.
The court stressed that this conclusion did not condone the treatment or question the genuineness of the applicant’s suffering. It dismissed the judicial review proceedings. The judgment addressed the tribunal decision; it did not overturn or remake the separate, unchallenged refusal of permission to remain.