The High Court has dismissed a married couple’s challenge to decisions refusing their international protection appeals, finding that the tribunal’s assessment of the husband’s claimed risk of persecution was reasonably open to it.
In a judgment delivered on 21 June 2019, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys considered the remaining ground of the couple’s judicial review: an allegation that the International Protection Appeals Tribunal acted irrationally in finding the husband was not exposed to persecution or serious harm in Bangladesh.
The husband, an anonymised applicant from Bangladesh, said he was a political activist with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and had faced threats and attacks from a rival party. He claimed that his wife left Bangladesh because of her association with him and feared she could be kidnapped. They moved to Ireland in August 2015 and applied for international protection.
The tribunal rejected their appeals in decisions dated September and October 2018. It accepted that the husband had been an active member of the BNP student wing in the UK and had some involvement with the party’s Irish wing. It rejected his claim to a significant political profile and his specific claim that he was joint secretary of the BNP in Ireland. The tribunal also rejected the couple’s accounts of alleged persecution, citing omissions, inconsistencies and contradictions.
The applicants argued that the tribunal had used the wrong comparison when considering political violence in Bangladesh: the general population, rather than BNP members or activists. The judge said that point could have mattered if the tribunal had relied only on the population-wide figures. However, he noted that it also referred to country information comparing casualties with the size of the political parties, and to the couple’s distance from areas identified as violence hotspots.
The judge concluded that, in light of those factors and the tribunal’s findings about the husband’s political profile, its conclusion that he had no objectively well-founded fear of persecution was reasonably open to it. He said there was no legal duty to distinguish among different degrees of low-level party membership in this assessment.
The proceedings sought judicial review of the tribunal decisions, with certiorari as the primary relief. The court dismissed the proceedings. It did not substitute its own assessment of the protection claims.