The High Court has rejected a South African widow’s challenge to the refusal of refugee status and subsidiary protection, finding that the International Protection Appeals Tribunal acted lawfully when it decided her appeal on the papers.
The woman, identified as M.S.S., arrived in Ireland and sought international protection in February 2022. She said that after her husband died in December 2019, members of his family accused her of killing him, forced her from their home, seized property and later threatened her.
She obtained a protection order in South Africa and produced a post-mortem report showing that her husband died following illness and surgery. Both the International Protection Office and the Tribunal broadly accepted her factual account.
The dispute concerned what those facts legally amounted to.
South Africa was then designated a safe country of origin. The Tribunal therefore had to decide the appeal without an oral hearing unless the interests of justice required one. Although M.S.S. requested an oral hearing, the High Court found she did not identify a factual or credibility dispute requiring oral evidence.
The Tribunal accepted that the dispute with her in-laws had involved threats, eviction and an unpleasant property dispute. It nevertheless concluded that the events did not amount to past persecution and did not establish a well-founded fear of future persecution. It also rejected her subsidiary-protection claim.
Mr Justice Barry O’Donnell held that the Tribunal was conducting a fresh, or de novo, appeal and was not bound by any favourable wording in the earlier IPO decision. The material facts themselves were not disputed, so the Tribunal was entitled to assess their legal significance differently.
The court also rejected arguments that relevant country information had been ignored or that the Tribunal acted irrationally. Its decision stated that all submitted material had been considered, and there was no evidence sufficient to displace that statement.
The judicial review application was refused. The court’s provisional view was that the respondents should receive their costs.