The High Court has quashed a decision refusing a Guinean woman refugee status, finding that the International Protection Appeals Tribunal failed to address the specific basis of her claim. The case must return to a differently constituted tribunal for a fresh appeal hearing.
The judgment concerns a judicial review of the Tribunal’s 16 July 2015 decision affirming a recommendation that the woman should not be declared a refugee. Mr Justice David Keane delivered judgment on 27 April 2017. The court did not decide whether she qualifies for refugee status; it quashed the appeal decision and ordered the matter remitted for a fresh hearing.
The woman said she was raped and tortured by soldiers in 1984, when she was pregnant, after her husband and father-in-law were arrested following a coup in Guinea. She later worked in the finance or accounting department of the National Assembly under its then president, El Hajj Aboubacar Somparé. After another military coup in 2008, she said Somparé warned that the military were looking for her because they believed she held confidential budget, mining-contract and banking information. She left Guinea and claimed asylum in Ireland in January 2009.
The Tribunal accepted that she was Guinean and found her account generally credible. It found that she had suffered rape and beatings in 1984, had worked in the Assembly under Somparé, and feared gender-based violence by political actors if returned. It also found she had no material political opinion of her own. The Tribunal nevertheless rejected the claim, including on the basis that the necessary connection to a Convention ground, principally political opinion, had not been established.
Mr Justice Keane said the applicant’s case was not simply that administrative staff generally were at risk. She claimed that her particular working relationship with Somparé, and a personal relationship that the military might perceive, could lead the junta to attribute an opposing political opinion to her. The Tribunal had accepted her statements as credible but did not address that specific argument, the court found.
The judgment also noted shortcomings in the Tribunal’s consideration of whether she faced a future risk of persecution. It did not expressly conclude that there was no such risk. The court’s ruling was that the failure to address the specific case made the decision unreasonable. The High Court therefore quashed the decision and directed a fresh hearing before a differently constituted Tribunal.