The High Court has quashed a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing refugee status to an anonymised Ethiopian woman, finding that the tribunal did not adequately consider medical evidence or decide whether her claimed Oromo ethnicity could itself put her at risk of persecution.
In a judgment delivered on 23 January 2015, Mr Justice Barr referred the case back to the tribunal for reconsideration by a different member. The court did not decide whether the woman qualified as a refugee.
The woman sought judicial review of the tribunal’s November 2009 decision. She said she was an Oromo woman from Ethiopia and that her husband was a prominent member of the Oromo Liberation Front. Her account included being raped and shot during a 2006 attack on her village, later detained and beaten, and fleeing to Ireland in 2007. These were her claims; the High Court’s judgment did not establish them as facts.
The court also extended the time for bringing the judicial review, which had been filed after the statutory 14-day limit. It accepted that the delay arose from changing solicitors and the Christmas period, was not the applicant’s fault, and caused no apparent prejudice to the respondents.
A medical report from SPIRASI described an abdominal scar as highly consistent with the account of being shot and undergoing a hysterectomy. It also recorded psychological symptoms indicative of post-traumatic stress. The tribunal referred to the physical findings but did not address the psychological findings. Mr Justice Barr held that the report significantly supported the woman’s core account and required careful consideration and clear reasons if its evidence was rejected. The tribunal’s treatment of it was inadequate.
The court separately found that the tribunal should have determined whether the woman was Ethiopian and Oromo. The judge said country-of-origin information before the tribunal provided credible support for the possibility that Oromo people faced persecution because of their ethnicity. Even if the woman’s account linking her risk to her husband’s alleged OLF involvement was not accepted, her ethnicity could still require separate consideration.
The court rejected two other grounds. It held that the tribunal was entitled to give limited weight to an OLF affidavit and a letter from an Oromo community association, given the stated shortcomings in their basis and knowledge. It also rejected the claim that the tribunal had unlawfully required the woman to show she was at greater risk than others in the village attack. The judge said specific targeting was not necessary to establish refugee status, but found the tribunal’s reference to the indiscriminate attack was a description of the evidence, not an added legal test.
The decision was quashed on the medical-evidence and ethnicity grounds alone. The tribunal must reconsider the case; the High Court made no refugee-status determination.