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High Court of Ireland Decisions |
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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> High Court of Ireland Decisions >> O. -v- Refugee Appeals Tribunal & Ors [2012] IEHC 5 (11 January 2012) URL: http://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IEHC/2012/H5.html Cite as: [2012] IEHC 5 |
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Judgment Title: O. -v- Refugee Appeals Tribunal & Ors Composition of Court: Judgment by: Hogan J. Status of Judgment: Approved |
Neutral Citation Number: [2012] IEHC 5 THE HIGH COURT 2008 1063 JR BETWEEN/ B. A. O. APPLICANT AND
REFUGEE APPEALS TRIBUNAL, MINISTER FOR JUSTICE AND EQUALITY AND ATTORNEY GENERAL RESPONDENTS JUDGMENT of Mr. Justice Hogan delivered on the 11th January, 2012 1. The applicant is a twenty-one year Iraqi national of Kurdish ethnicity who arrived in the State in December, 2007 whereupon he sought asylum. The present application is for leave to apply for judicial review to quash a decision of the Refugee Appeal Tribunal of 22nd July, 2008, as refused his asylum application. 2. While the applicant initially presented with no supporting documents, his account concerning the fate of his deceased parents in Iraq does not appear to have been disputed by the Tribunal. (An Iraqi identification card was later supplied by the applicant in circumstances where he claimed that it had been sent to him by his family from Iraq.) As we shall presently seem, the case really turns on an interpretation of key facts surrounding the death of his parents. 3. The applicant’s case is that his father was a high ranking member of Sadaam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party. In the course of his s. 11 interview the applicant admitted that he could not provide a detailed account of his father’s activities, save that his father wore a special uniform reserved for senior Ba’ath figures and that he had important security responsibilities. He also said that he had never visited his father’s place of work. It must be recalled, however, that the applicant was just twelve years of age when the Ba’ath regime collapsed in April, 2003. 4. Prior to 2003 the family lived in the Khandra neighbourhood in Mosul in northern Iraq, but his father fled in the aftermath of the US-led invasion in the spring of that year. His father was very concerned about his safety and that of his family. He moved to Kirkuk, before moving back to another neighbourhood of Mosul, where the family stayed with relatives. The applicant contends that his father lived in a state of constant fear and informed his family that he was under surveillance. The applicant says that the family stays indoor most of the time during this period. 5. The applicant contends that on the eve of Ramadan in October, 2007 his parents went to the market to shop, but that they were killed following an incident in which a hand grenade was thrown at their car. Police inquiries into the incident, such as they were, came to naught. This in itself is scarcely surprising, since a Canadian report from January, 2004 quoted local police as acknowledging “that they have not solved a single crime against ex-Baathists”, saying that “they will themselves become targets if they attempt to do so.” The applicant then escaped to Syria with other family members before ultimately being brought to Ireland by an agent. 6. The Tribunal member concluded that the applicant had supplied insufficient evidence to show that the killings were targeted, in the sense of being a reprisal or a revenge killing by reason of the applicant’s father’s involvement in the Ba’ath Party:
9. Indeed, this view is supported by country of origin information to which the Tribunal member but briefly alluded. Thus, for example, a press release issued by the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs from Basra on 30th July, 2007 (i.e., a few months before the applicant’s parents were killed) is headed “Families in south displaced as former Baathists targeted.” The press release goes on to say that the number of killings of ex-Ba’athists had surged in the previous three weeks and that local militias were planning to “exterminate over 4,000 members of the Ba’ath Party”. While it might be said in response that this report merely concerned southern Iraq where the Sadaam regime was particularly detested, it gives some indication of the extent to which those who had suffered at the hands of that odious regime were determined to exact revenge on former Ba’athists, even by mid-2007. 10. This was nevertheless critical country of origin information which the Tribunal member could not justly ignore. As Cooke J. observed in his seminal judgment in R. v. Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform [2009] IEHC 353, where an adverse finding of this kind involves:
12. For all of these reasons the applicant has established substantial grounds for contending that this decision is unreasonable in law. 13. Second, the Tribunal member does not afford the applicant of the benefit of a doubt to which he is arguably entitled. After all, no specific finding of a lack of credibility had been made by the Tribunal member concerning the applicant’s credibility. While at this stage we shall never probably know the reasons for this attack, once it is clear - as the country of origin information tends to suggest - that revenge attacks of this kind were regrettably all too common, then, as the applicant’s account could well be true, there are plainly substantial grounds for contending that he should have been given the benefit of the doubt in this regard. Conclusions
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