The High Court has refused a married couple leave to appeal its earlier refusal to quash decisions rejecting their international protection claims.
In a judgment delivered on 4 February 2019, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys said the proposed appeal question was whether “special circumstances” could compel an international protection decision-maker to investigate the authenticity of a document relied on by an applicant.
The judge gave several reasons for refusing leave. The alleged duty to investigate documents had not been pleaded in the earlier judicial review proceedings, he said, and the earlier judgment had not referred to the Court of Appeal decision on which the proposed question relied. The point was therefore not suitable for appeal from that judgment.
The judge also rejected the proposed question’s premise as a matter of European Convention on Human Rights law. He said the Convention did not create a right to asylum or international protection, and that refusing protection did not, by itself, engage the rights at issue in a European Court of Human Rights case concerning deportation. He described as obiter, rather than binding, an earlier Court of Appeal comment about possible “special circumstances” requiring inquiries.
The judgment said investigating documents might be desirable in exceptional circumstances if it could be done without revealing an applicant’s identity, but failure to investigate would not, on that basis, justify quashing a decision. It also noted that making inquiries in a person’s country of origin about documents linked to an identifiable applicant could disclose that the person had sought protection, contrary to the confidentiality duty in section 26 of the International Protection Act 2015.
The judge said the couple’s claims had been rejected as incoherent and implausible. He noted that the husband had lived in Pakistan for years after the alleged persecution, both applicants had lived in the UK without seeking asylum, and they sought protection in Ireland after their UK visas expired. He said doubts about their documents were not the sole or main basis for rejecting their claims and that the case was not borderline.
The court refused both applications for leave to appeal. The judgment did not reconsider or overturn the earlier decisions refusing the couple’s protection claims.