The High Court has refused an applicant leave to seek judicial review of a Refugee Appeals Tribunal decision upholding the rejection of his asylum application. Mr Justice McCarthy ruled that the applicant had not shown substantial grounds for challenging the decision.
The application concerned a Tribunal decision dated 10 September 2007, which affirmed the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner’s recommendation that the applicant should not receive refugee status. The judicial review hearing took place on 28 July 2009. The court gave judgment on 4 October 2010.
The applicant, identified in the judgment only as A., claimed to be Somali and to fear persecution because of his race. He said that his father and brother were shot in 1992 and that, in 2001, he was abducted, held for ransom for 47 days and tortured. He also said he escaped to Ethiopia and later lived in Sudan. These were his claims, not findings by the court.
His earlier asylum claim in the UK had been rejected in 2005 and on appeal in 2006. The Irish authorities noted substantial differences between the accounts he had given in the UK and Ireland, including his date of birth and descriptions of his family circumstances, the alleged raid and his journey to the UK. The Tribunal rejected his explanations for those discrepancies and upheld the negative recommendation on credibility grounds.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal had relied on an unsupported assumption about how dominant clans would take property, failed to address his explanations fully and did not properly consider country information, earlier Tribunal decisions, his age, child-specific material or a medical report describing scars. He also challenged the Tribunal’s reference to questions used to assess his nationality, given that his appeal was non-oral.
The High Court said the Tribunal had made no final finding on nationality and the case did not turn on it. It considered the Tribunal’s reasoning about the alleged abduction a permissible credibility assessment, and found no irrationality in its treatment of the differences between the UK and Irish accounts. The court also said that silence about particular documents did not itself establish that they had been ignored, and that the material cited could not overcome the credibility concerns in this case.
The court noted that the applicant had been accepted as a minor, but that the Tribunal decision was made one day before his 18th birthday. It concluded that his age and the benefit of the doubt could not overcome the credibility difficulties. It also found that the medical report did not have sufficient probative value to affect the decision.
The court’s ruling was limited to the leave application: it decided that substantial grounds had not been shown and refused leave. It did not grant judicial review or quash the Tribunal decision.