The High Court has refused a mother and her infant son leave to challenge decisions affirming recommendations that neither should be declared a refugee.
In a judgment delivered on 5 September 2014, Mr Justice McDermott said the applicants had not established substantial grounds for judicial review. The challenges concerned separate Refugee Appeals Tribunal decisions dated 19 May 2009 and 16 July 2010.
The mother, identified in the judgment as B.J., is from Sierra Leone. She claimed that a rebel group known as the “Mosquitoes” had raped her and abducted her husband, a pastor and former member of the group, in September 2004. She said the group later threatened her, and that a local pastor helped her leave the country. Her son’s refugee claim relied largely on her account and included fears that he could be recruited as a child soldier or targeted because of his mother.
The Tribunal did not accept the mother’s account as credible. It considered her knowledge of her husband’s past involvement with the group vague and found it implausible that he could preach against the group for years without trouble. It also relied on the period between the reported threats and attacks. The Tribunal found that the son’s claims about forced prostitution and future recruitment were speculative, noting that Sierra Leone’s civil war had ended in 2002.
The applicants argued that the Tribunal had failed to assess future risks linked to gender-based discrimination in Sierra Leone and had wrongly required “firm evidence” that persecution would occur. The judge concluded that the Tribunal had considered the country information and carried out a forward-looking assessment. He said its references to “firm evidence” had to be read in the context of the decisions as a whole, which used the applicable standards of “serious possibility”, “reasonable chance” and “real chance” of persecution.
The court also rejected arguments that factual errors undermined the decisions. It found no material error in the Tribunal’s treatment of the timeline and said minor date and age mistakes in the son’s decision did not affect the central issues. The court considered the Tribunal’s comments about relocation within Sierra Leone to be conditional “even if” findings, made after it had rejected the mother’s account. It also found no demonstrable prejudice from the roughly ten-month interval between the hearing and the Tribunal’s decision.
The court extended the time for the mother’s application, which had been filed three days late. It said she had formed the intention to challenge the decision within the allowed period and that the delay was short. The extension did not change the result: both applications were refused, and no decision to quash either Tribunal decision was made.