The High Court has refused an applicant’s request for judicial review of a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision refusing to recommend that he be declared a refugee.
In a judgment delivered on 10 July 2013, Mr Justice Mac Eochaidh said the applicant had not shown substantial grounds for the orders sought. The challenge concerned the Tribunal’s 1 July 2009 decision. The court was considering whether to grant leave in a telescoped judicial review application; it did not rehear the refugee claim or substitute its own assessment of credibility.
The applicant, anonymised in the judgment as S. Z., was born in China in 1973. He said he feared persecution by Chinese authorities because of his family’s involvement in protests and a group called “Huhan”. He also said he feared loan sharks after borrowing money to bribe officials over his parents’ imprisonment. These were his claims, not findings made by the High Court.
The judgment recounts inconsistencies in his accounts of why he left China, the nature of the group, and the money borrowed for travel and to assist his parents. The Refugee Applications Commissioner and the Tribunal made adverse credibility findings. The Tribunal also considered his failure to seek asylum during a month in Spain, his lack of knowledge about the nationality of the passport used to travel, and a translated summons that did not state why he was being summoned.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal had failed to address his core claim and past persecution, had not properly considered country-of-origin information, and had made flawed credibility findings. The judge rejected those arguments, describing the claim as inconsistent and incoherent. He said judicial review could not be used to appeal the Tribunal’s credibility assessment, and found that the reasons given for rejecting credibility were legally adequate.
The judge held that the Tribunal could consider the failure to seek asylum in Spain as part of its credibility assessment. However, the Tribunal had been wrong to refer to section 11B(b) of the Refugee Act 1996: that provision applied only where an applicant expressly claimed Ireland was the first safe country encountered. The judge concluded that the mistaken reference did not invalidate the decision.
He also found no legal flaw in the Tribunal’s treatment of the summons. Because it gave no reason for the summons, its relevance to the persecution claim could not be established. The court refused the orders sought.