The High Court has dismissed two judicial review applications by a Ukrainian husband and wife challenging decisions that rejected their appeals for subsidiary protection. The applications sought to quash decisions made by the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) on 5 October 2017.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Richard Humphreys on 17 September 2018, concerned claims arising from events the couple said took place in Ukraine. The husband claimed he had been arrested, detained and ill-treated in 2013 and 2014 because of his involvement in protests. The wife claimed that soldiers visited their home in February 2014, warned against protest involvement and raped her. These were their accounts, not findings by the High Court.
The couple’s asylum claims had been rejected. During an earlier appeal, it was accepted that the husband had applied for an Irish visa under another name in 2012, after that fact had initially been denied during the protection process. Their subsequent subsidiary protection applications were also rejected, and IPAT dismissed their appeals. The High Court proceedings were not a fresh assessment of the claims: the judge said judicial review is not an appeal on the facts.
The applicants argued, among other points, that IPAT had mishandled medical reports, credibility findings, the risk of impunity for people associated with the former Ukrainian regime, the wife’s account of rape, and risks connected with armed conflict or military service. The judge said IPAT had considered the medical material and was entitled to assess it alongside the other evidence. He also found that the tribunal had given separate grounds for its decisions, including its assessment that a change of regime meant the applicants were no longer at risk.
The judge criticised IPAT’s reliance on the wife’s failure to seek counselling as a factor against her credibility, saying that seeking counselling was only one possible response to such an experience. But he held that other credibility findings had also been made and, more fundamentally, that IPAT had an independent basis for rejecting her application: its conclusion that she was not currently at risk following the regime change. That basis had not been shown to be invalid.
On military-service risk, the judge noted that the husband had not received a call-up, evaded military service, been convicted in Ukraine or faced an outstanding prison sentence. He said the claim of harm on that basis had not been established.
The court dismissed both applications. It did not decide the underlying protection claims afresh; it found no basis to quash the tribunal’s decisions.