The High Court has granted a Somali asylum applicant judicial review of a 2011 decision refusing his appeal, finding that the Refugee Appeals Tribunal failed to assess the risk he might face if returned to Somalia and failed to give due regard to relevant Red Cross messages about his family.
Mr Justice O’Keeffe delivered the judgment on 20 November 2012. The applicant sought an order quashing the Tribunal’s decision of 27 May 2011. The court granted relief on two grounds: the absence of a future-risk assessment and the failure to give due regard to relevant documents.
The applicant, whose identity is anonymised in the judgment, said he was Somali and a member of the Reer Hamar minority clan. He had initially given inaccurate information about his journey to Ireland and previous asylum applications, but later acknowledged that he had left Somalia in 2003 and had applied for asylum in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The Tribunal treated his account as lacking credibility, particularly on core elements of his claim.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal’s credibility concerns did not remove its duty to consider whether he faced future persecution. He also said the Tribunal had wrongly treated his family’s continued presence in Somalia as undermining his fear, when his family had allegedly been displaced and subjected to violence. The judgment records his claims that his father was killed and his sister taken away; these were allegations, not findings made by the court.
The applicant relied on messages sent through a Red Cross tracing process initiated by the HSE. The messages, which the judgment quotes, described an attack on the family home, displacement and poor living conditions, and alleged that the applicant’s father had been killed and his sister taken. The Tribunal had said it gave “no weight” to “other documents personal to the appellant.”
The court accepted that the applicant had lied about his travel and asylum history, but found those untruths did not go to the core of his claimed fear in the same way as in cases relied on by the respondents. It held that the Tribunal should still have assessed future risk, based on elements of the account that could possibly be true.
The court also found the Tribunal’s description of the documents as “other documents personal” was unclear and that giving them no weight was unreasonable in light of the Red Cross messages. They were obtained through an HSE tracing process and were not documents issued by the Somali state or its embassies.
The court rejected the separate fair-procedures argument concerning the family’s relocation: the issue had been raised in submissions to the Tribunal. The judgment grants relief on the two stated grounds; it does not determine that the applicant qualifies for refugee status or make a final finding that the alleged persecution occurred.