United Kingdom Immigration and Asylum (AIT/IAC) Unreported Judgments

A black background with a black square Description automatically generated with medium confidence

 

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER	Case No: UI-2024-004793
	First-tier Tribunal No: PA/61065/2023

 

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 26 ^th of March 2025

 

Before

 

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE HANSON

DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE COLE

 

Between

 

BS

(ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)

Appellant

and

 

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT

Respondent

Representation :

For the Appellant: Ms Patel, Counsel instructed by GMIAU

For the Respondent: Mr McVeety, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

 

Heard at Manchester Civil Justice Centre on 14 March 2025

 

Order Regarding Anonymity

 

Pursuant to rule 14 of the Tribunal Procedure (Upper Tribunal) Rules 2008, the appellant is granted anonymity.

 

No-one shall publish or reveal any information, including the name or address of the appellant, likely to lead members of the public to identify the appellant. Failure to comply with this order could amount to a contempt of court.

DECISION AND REASONS

1.              The appellant is a citizen of Iraq. He arrived in the UK on 10 October 2021 and claimed asylum. His protection claim was refused, and he appealed to the First-tier Tribunal. His appeal was dismissed in a decision promulgated 9 September 2024. The appellant now appeals to the Upper Tribunal.

Background

2.              The appellant asserts that he was conceived because of his mother's affair outside of the marriage to his father. This matter was brought to the father's attention by the mother's sister many years later. The appellant's father and maternal aunt had an abusive relationship and the allegation that the appellant was not the father's biological child came out during an argument between the appellant's father and aunt. The appellant asserts that his father wishes to kill or seriously harm him due to the shame brought on the family.

3.              The respondent refused the protection claim on the basis that it was not accepted that the appellant's account of events in Iraq was credible.

4.              The appellant appealed to the First-tier Tribunal. The appeal was heard by Judge Hillis on 29 August 2024. It was agreed by the parties before Judge Hillis that the sole issue for resolution was the credibility of the appellant's account. It was agreed that if the appellant's account were found to be reasonably likely to be true, then his appeal should be allowed. In his decision promulgated on 9 September 2024, Judge Hillis found the appellant not to be credible in the core aspects of his account and dismissed the appeal.

5.              The appellant submitted his own grounds of challenge. These were rejected by the First-tier Tribunal. However, on renewal to the Upper Tribunal, Judge Owens granted permission on the following terms:

It is arguable that the judge failed to consider the claim against the background context of honour crimes in Iraq (see latest CPIN: Iraq Blood feuds, honour crimes and tribal violence July 2024) and that the judge impermissibly found the account to be inherently implausible in line with Y v SSHD [2006] ECWA Civ 1223.

6.              Thus, the matter came before us to determine whether Judge Hillis' decision involved the making of an error on a point of law.

The Hearing

7.              Ms Patel relied upon the grounds prepared by the appellant and the skeleton argument prepared by Ms Khan of Counsel. Ms Patel confirmed that the latest CPIN: Iraq Blood feuds, honour crimes and tribal violence July 2024 was before the judge. She submitted that the judge made no reference to the country information and thus he did not reach his credibility findings in the relevant context of honour crimes in Iraq. Ms Patel submitted that the judge relied too much on plausibility and viewed the case from his own perspective. She urged for the decision to be set aside and remitted to the First-tier Tribunal.

8.              Ms McVeety summarised the appellant's account and submitted that it was not plausible in any society, even considering the culture of honour crimes in Iraq. He submitted that there is no evidence to suggest that the account is plausible. Mr McVeety submitted that the decision was clearly open to the judge and so this appeal must be dismissed.

9.              In response, Ms Patel submitted that the background evidence demonstrates that persons involved in honour issues do not act in a rational manner. She reiterated that that the account must be viewed in the context of the country information.

10.          After hearing the submissions, we reserved our decision.

Discussion and Analysis

11.          This is a challenge to the judge's findings on credibility. The grounds do not permit the Upper Tribunal to simply disagree with the result or the way in which it was reached. As held in South Bucks County Council v Porter [2004] UKHL 33, reasons must:

36. [...] enable the reader to understand why the matter was decided as it was and what conclusions were reached on the "principal controversial issues", disclosing how any issue of law or fact was resolved. Reasons can be briefly stated, the degree of particularity required depending entirely on the nature of the issues falling for decision.

12.          In Volpi v Volpi [2022] EWCA Civ 464, at [2], the Court of Appeal reiterated the caution with which an appellate tribunal must approach findings of fact:

i) An appeal court should not interfere with the trial judge's conclusions on primary facts unless it is satisfied that he was plainly wrong.

ii) The adverb "plainly" does not refer to the degree of confidence felt by the appeal court that it would not have reached the same conclusion as the trial judge. It does not matter, with whatever degree of certainty, that the appeal court considers that it would have reached a different conclusion. What matters is whether the decision under appeal is one that no reasonable judge could have reached.

iii) An appeal court is bound, unless there is compelling reason to the contrary, to assume that the trial judge has taken the whole of the evidence into his consideration. The mere fact that a judge does not mention a specific piece of evidence does not mean that he overlooked it.

iv) The validity of the findings of fact made by a trial judge is not aptly tested by considering whether the judgment presents a balanced account of the evidence. The trial judge must of course consider all the material evidence (although it need not all be discussed in his judgment). The weight which he gives to it is however pre-eminently a matter for him.

v) An appeal court can therefore set aside a judgment on the basis that the judge failed to give the evidence a balanced consideration only if the judge's conclusion was rationally insupportable.

vi) Reasons for judgment will always be capable of having been better expressed. An appeal court should not subject a judgment to narrow textual analysis. Nor should it be picked over or construed as though it was a piece of legislation or a contract.

13.          The appellant asserts over-reliance by the judge on what he considered to be plausible.

14.          Judge Owens in granting permission referred to the case of Y v SSHD [2006] EWCA Civ 1223 that stated:

"25. ... The fundamental one is that he should be cautious before finding an account to be inherently incredible, because there is a considerable risk that he will be over influenced by his own views on what is or is not plausible, and those views will have inevitably been influenced by his own background in this country and by the customs and ways of our own society. It is therefore important that he should seek to view an appellant's account of events, as Mr Singh rightly argues, in the context of conditions in the country from which the appellant comes".

15.          Further, in HK v SSHD [2006] EWCA Civ 1037, Neuberger LJ:

[28]. Further, in many asylum cases, some, even most, of the appellant's story may seem inherently unlikely but that does not mean that it is untrue. The ingredients of the story, and the story as a whole, have to be considered against the available country evidence and reliable expert evidence, and other familiar factors, such as consistency with what the appellant has said before, and with other factual evidence (where there is any).

[29]. Inherent probability, which may be helpful in many domestic cases, can be a dangerous, even a wholly inappropriate, factor to rely on in some asylum cases. Much of the evidence will be referable to societies with customs and circumstances which are very different from those of which the members of the fact-finding tribunal have any (even second-hand) experience. Indeed, it is likely that the country which an asylum-seeker has left will be suffering from the sort of problems and dislocations with which the overwhelming majority of residents of this country will be wholly unfamiliar. The point is well made in Hathaway on Law of Refugee Status (1991) at page 81:

"In assessing the general human rights information, decision-makers must constantly be on guard to avoid implicitly recharacterizing the nature of the risk based on their own perceptions of reasonability."

[30]. Inherent improbability in the context of asylum cases was discussed at some length by Lord Brodie in Awala -v- Secretary of State [2005] CSOH 73. At paragraph 22, he pointed out that it was "not proper to reject an applicant's account merely on the basis that it is not credible or not plausible. To say that an applicant's account is not credible is to state a conclusion" (emphasis added). At paragraph 24, he said that rejection of a story on grounds of implausibility must be done "on reasonably drawn inferences and not simply on conjecture or speculation". He went on to emphasise, as did Pill LJ in Ghaisari, the entitlement of the fact-finder to rely "on his common sense and his ability, as a practical and informed person, to identify what is or is not plausible". However, he accepted that "there will be cases where actions which may appear implausible if judged by...Scottish standards, might be plausible when considered within the context of the applicant's social and cultural background"

16.          Judge Hillis is an experienced First-tier Tribunal Judge who specifically confirmed that he had given anxious scrutiny to all the documents submitted. There is no basis for the suggestion that the judge failed to consider the appellant's claim in the context of the country information before him (which included the latest CPIN: Iraq Blood feuds, honour crimes and tribal violence July 2024).

17.          Furthermore, the lack of merit in this submission was emphasised by the fact that Ms Patel was unable to highlight any reference in the country information to children conceived due to an extra-marital relationship being later subject to honour crime due to bringing shame on a family. She was unable to refer to any country information that was supportive to the specific circumstances as detailed in the account given by the appellant.

18.          The country information detailed in the skeleton argument and referred to by Ms Patel was rather generic information about honour crimes in Iraq and mainly referred to women being the victims of honour crimes.

19.          Therefore, we find that the judge did not fail to assess the appellant's account in the context of the country information.

20.          Judge Hillis did refer to aspects of the appellant's account being implausible. However, in our judgment there is no merit in the submission that the judge impermissibly relied on plausibility.

21.          We find that we agree with the submissions of Mr McVeety regarding the appellant's account not being plausible in any society. In this case we find that the judge relied "on his common sense and his ability, as a practical and informed person, to identify what is or is not plausible."

22.          The judge found that "it was simply not plausible" that the appellant's father would wish to seriously harm his own son based on the uncorroborated evidence of the appellant's maternal aunt, a woman with whom he had a seriously fractious relationship and who made the allegation as part of a heated argument.

23.          We find that this is a finding that the judge was entitled to make. It was a finding that was clearly open to him on the evidence that was before him, and it is a sustainable finding. As detailed previously, the judge did consider the country information in reaching his findings and thus there is no error of law in his finding that aspects of the appellant's account were implausible.

24.          Finally, although not identified as an issue in the grant of permission, the skeleton argument submits that Judge Hillis failed to consider the appellant's evidence. The brief submission on this matter refers to paragraph 15 of the judge's decision and the appellant's mother not agreeing to a DNA test. It is suggested that the judge misconstrued the appellant's evidence.

25.          The judge does not specifically refer to the appellant's claim that his mother stated that she would not undergo a DNA test as the results would not be what the appellant hoped. However, this does not mean that the judge failed to consider all the appellant's evidence. We find that there is no basis for concluding that the judge had overlooked or misconstrued any of the appellant's evidence.

26.          Overall, the judge has provided adequate reasons for finding the appellant's account not to be credible. The judge has given succinct and sufficient reasons for his conclusion that the appellant had not proven his account is reasonably likely to be true.

Notice of Decision

The First-tier Tribunal has not been shown to have made an error of law material to the decision to dismiss the appeal. The determination shall stand.

 

 

C R Cole

Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal

Immigration and Asylum Chamber

 

 

19 March 2025