The High Court has refused relief in a judicial review brought by a Nigerian national challenging the refusal of his refugee status appeal, finding that the Refugee Appeals Tribunal had evidence to support its reliance on state protection in relation to the Kaduna riots described in his claim.
The judgment by Mr Justice Clarke, delivered on 26 January 2006, addressed a narrow challenge to the Tribunal’s decision of 27 August 2004. Leave to bring the judicial review had been limited to whether the Tribunal acted irrationally by finding state protection would be available if the applicant returned to Nigeria, despite an alleged lack of evidence for that view.
The applicant said he feared persecution as a Christian pastor by Muslim groups and his father’s tribe. He relied in part on his account of being attacked and injured by a Muslim mob during riots in Kaduna linked to the 2002 Miss World contest. The Refugee Applications Commissioner had recommended against refugee status, mainly on credibility grounds. The Tribunal’s stated reasoning, however, did not rely on a finding that the applicant lacked credibility.
On the riots, the court noted that material before the Tribunal included a report titled “Womensrightswatch – Nigeria: Report on Riots in Kaduna”. It recorded that security forces brought the events under control, including a dusk-to-dawn curfew for two days. The judge found there was ample country-of-origin information to support the Tribunal’s conclusion that the riots were quelled and that police protection was available. He said the distinction between the Tribunal’s reference to police and the report’s less specific description of security forces was not material. The judgment also noted the applicant’s account that he spent a significant period after the riots in a secure location protected by security forces.
The judge treated the Tribunal’s separate reference to possible ill-treatment by the applicant’s father as more problematic because no country-of-origin information specifically addressing protection from the father’s tribe appeared to have been before it. But he concluded that the Tribunal had already rejected that part of the claim for reasons independent of state protection, including the absence of evidence that the applicant would be persecuted by the tribe. The state-protection comment did not materially affect that reasoning.
The court therefore found no evidential failure that materially influenced the Tribunal’s overall conclusion and refused the relief sought. It did not decide what level of judicial scrutiny should generally apply to immigration cases involving fundamental rights; the judge said the challenge would fail even under a higher level of scrutiny.