The High Court has refused an Albanian man’s application to quash the rejection of his claim for refugee status and subsidiary protection, finding no material legal error in the International Protection Appeals Tribunal’s decision.
The applicant, identified as RK, said his father murdered a man in 2000 following a land dispute, prompting a blood feud under traditional Kanun law. He claimed his family moved to Kosovo and received threats, and that he stayed indoors to avoid being found. The tribunal accepted that blood feuds occur in Albania, particularly in the Shkoder region, and that self-isolation was consistent with other accounts. But it found his testimony vague and non-specific and concluded he had not established that his account was true on the balance of probabilities.
RK argued in the judicial review that the tribunal had speculated in assessing his credibility, unlawfully rejected supporting documents and preferred country information it had produced itself. The High Court held that the tribunal was entitled to assess his answers about his knowledge of the Kosovo village where he said he had lived, his uncle’s knowledge of those allegedly seeking him, and his return to Albania in 2011 to obtain a passport. The court also found the tribunal could rely on discrepancies between his earlier interviews and hearing evidence about how threats were made and whether members of the other family had been in Kosovo.
The court examined two certificates dated 6 November 2015: one attributed to a police directorate and another to the Peace Missionaries Union. The documents were not formally translated. The tribunal gave them no weight after considering RK’s credibility and country information about potentially unreliable blood-feud attestations. The High Court found the tribunal had wrongly referred to the police certificate as postdating RK’s protection application, which was made in May 2018. However, the court concluded that the tribunal’s assessment of the certificate’s weight turned on its credibility findings, not that date error.
The court also found RK had not been put on notice that the tribunal might decide the police certificate did not establish that his father killed the man. But it held that this concern did not materially affect the outcome: the tribunal had already rejected the protection claim on its broader credibility assessment. The court rejected the challenge to the tribunal’s use of country information, refused the requested relief and ordered costs in favour of the respondents.