The High Court has quashed a first-instance decision refusing international protection to an anonymised applicant from Georgia, after the International Protection Office (IPO) failed to consider three documents he had submitted. The court found the omission fundamentally undermined the fairness and integrity of the process. It made no finding on whether the applicant was entitled to protection.
The applicant said he had worked as a Georgian border guard and feared harm over his alleged connection to the 2012 Lopota incident, an armed border incident in which more than a dozen people died. He claimed members of the Kist community believed he was involved in wrongful deaths, and that he could be scapegoated by the Georgian government. These were claims in his protection application, not findings by the court.
After an IPO interview in August 2022, the applicant emailed documents in response to requests for proof of his police training, employment and wages. The documents purported to include a training certificate, bank statement and employment certificate. The IPO later acknowledged receiving all three, but said they had not been linked to his file because of an administrative error. They were not considered by the decision-maker.
The IPO’s report said the applicant had submitted no supporting documents. Although the decision accepted, with the benefit of the doubt, that he had been a border guard, it rejected other elements of his account as not credible. The court observed that it was unclear whether the IPO accepted he had been working as a border guard at the time of the Lopota incident.
The International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) postponed the appeal hearing and requested translations of two documents. But the High Court held that the appeal process did not remedy the failure to examine the documents at first instance. It found the documents potentially relevant to whether the applicant was employed at the time of the incident and whether his division was in the region where it occurred. Their omission also meant the IPO did not pursue inquiries that the documents might have prompted.
The court extended the time for bringing the judicial review and granted an order of certiorari quashing the IPO decision. It said the documents’ first consideration would otherwise fall to the IPAT, despite the IPO’s statutory role in examining the application. The court left the final form of the order and consequential matters for further submissions, listing the matter 14 days after judgment.