The High Court dismissed a judicial review application challenging the International Protection Appeals Tribunal’s rejection of a Zimbabwean man’s subsidiary protection appeal. Mr Justice Richard Humphreys held that the tribunal’s decision had not been shown to be unlawful.
The applicant said Zimbabwean police wanted him in August 2011. His wife stated that a police officer assaulted and sexually assaulted her on 21 August that year. The applicant left Zimbabwe on 28 August, travelled via Saudi Arabia and arrived in Ireland on 24 September 2011. His asylum claim was rejected. He later applied for subsidiary protection, but the Refugee Applications Commissioner rejected that application in March 2015. The Refugee Appeals Tribunal dismissed his appeal in March 2017.
The applicant did not challenge the tribunal’s negative credibility findings in the judicial review proceedings. Those findings included doubts about accounts of police searching for him, his decision to return to a place where police could find him, and leaving his wife and children at home despite saying he had been advised to stay away. The judge said the tribunal member, who had seen and heard the applicant, was best placed to assess those matters.
The applicant argued that a SPIRASI report concerning his wife’s post-traumatic stress disorder supported her account of an assault. The judge criticised aspects of the report’s reasoning, including its reliance on the wife’s account of nightmares, which could not be objectively verified. He also noted that the report did not rule out other possible causes of her injuries, including her account of being forced into prostitution and raped in South Africa.
The judge said the tribunal had considered the report and was entitled to conclude that it did not outweigh the credibility findings. He distinguished between rejecting a report and finding that it was insufficiently probative to alter the outcome. He also held that fair procedures did not require the tribunal to tell an applicant in advance that evidence would not be sufficient to prove the case.
The court dismissed the application, finding that the tribunal’s assessment of the evidence fell within its decision-making role and that unlawfulness had not been established.