The High Court has quashed part of a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision concerning a Zimbabwean applicant for refugee status, ruling that the Tribunal failed to give a reasoned assessment of the risk of future persecution if he were returned to Zimbabwe.
In a judgment delivered on 9 February 2017, Ms Justice O’Regan remitted the matter to the Tribunal for reconsideration on that discrete issue and a supplemental decision. The court upheld the other considerations and findings in the Tribunal’s decision and did not require them to be reopened.
The applicant had sought judicial review of a Tribunal order dated 5 April 2016, which was provided to him on 20 June 2016. Among his grounds, he argued that the Tribunal had not properly assessed his evidence, the passage of time, documents he submitted, or the possibility of future persecution. The court had already ruled, in an earlier judgment in the same proceedings, that the standard for assessing past events was the balance of probabilities, with the benefit of the doubt in appropriate circumstances.
The dispute focused in submissions on a December 2013 letter purporting to be from the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. It described two attacks on people identified as the applicant’s parents, and said they later died in 2007. The Tribunal said it could not verify the documents submitted and, given inconsistencies in the applicant’s account, considered them of little value in corroborating his version of events.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal should have used its statutory power to request further inquiries to verify the letter. The respondents disputed that there was such a duty and argued that even if the letter were genuine, it would not resolve the credibility issues or establish why the applicant left Zimbabwe in 2013.
Justice O’Regan said the court did not need to decide whether the applicant’s parents’ deaths formed the core of his account. Even if the letter were verified, that would not sufficiently restore his credibility regarding past events. She was not satisfied that the Tribunal had a positive duty to use the statutory inquiry power, and found that it had considered the documents rather than disregarding them entirely.
However, the Tribunal had accepted that the applicant was a Zimbabwean national and had treated some of the documentation as having at least limited corroborative value. The judge held those matters should have been considered when assessing future risk, even though they were insufficient to establish past persecution. The High Court left that risk assessment to the Tribunal on remittal.