England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions

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Cite as: [2008] EWCA Civ 1019

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		Neutral Citation Number: [2008] EWCA Civ 1019
		Case No: C5/2008/1107

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE ASYLUM AND IMMIGRATION TRIBUNAL
[AIT No: HX/04520/2002]

Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL

2nd September 2008

B e f o r e :

LORD JUSTICE LONGMORE
____________________

Between:

	HJ (IRAN)	Appellant
	- and -
	SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT	Respondent

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____________________

Mr P Lewis (instructed by Messrs TRP) appeared on behalf of the Appellant.
THE RESPONDENT DID NOT APPEAR AND WAS NOT REPRESENTED.
____________________

HTML VERSION OF JUDGMENT
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Lord Justice Longmore:

This is an application for permission to appeal from a determination of the AIT dated 4 June 2008. The applicant, to whom I shall refer as HJ, arrived in this country from Iran as long ago as 9 July 2001. He claimed that he had been beaten up during his military service because he had disobeyed an order to shoot an elderly man. He said that he escaped from the hospital, where he was taken after he had been beaten up, and went to Kerman, which is a province in Iran, and that he spent four years in Kerman; that while he was there he met a lady called Azam, who was a wife of a local preacher. He fell in love with her. He had spent his time in Kerman as a taxi driver under a false name. They tried to elope but they were caught and the applicant managed to escape, leaving Azam behind. He arrived, as I say, in the United Kingdom on 9 July 2001, he was interviewed in August 2001 and his claim for asylum was refused on 21 August of that year. He appealed to an adjudicator, who dismissed the appeal on 2 May 2002. However, Lightman J in the Administrative Court quashed the refusal of permission to appeal made by the IAT as it then was, and thus the matter proceeded to reconsideration. Unfortunately, although Lightman J had given his judgment on 23 June 2003, that reconsideration did not take place until 28 June 2005. The conclusion at that stage was that the decision of the adjudicator was perverse because he had among other things failed to consider what the position would have been if the applicant had been returned to Iran as an adulterer.

So a fresh determination was ordered on 13 October 2005. That took place on 24 February 2006 before Senior Immigration Judge Chalkley and another immigration judge. In due course that decision itself was set aside by the order of the Court of Appeal made on 5 December 2006 and yet another determination had to be arranged, which is the determination from which permission to appeal is now sought, and that was dated 4 June 2008, a determination made by designated Immigration Judge Billingham and Immigration Judge Herlihy. That tribunal dismissed the applicant's appeal because they considered that the applicant's accounts of the matters were not credible. They gave a fairly long decision and Mr Lewis, who has appeared for the applicant this morning, has been able to make certain cogent criticisms of that decision. The reasons they gave for saying that there was no real risk of persecution as a result of the applicant refusing to obey superior orders to shoot an elderly person were: firstly that no political reason had been given for the disobedience; secondly that if it had happened the applicant would have left at once rather than relocate in Iran itself for four years; thirdly that there was no evidence of any arrest warrants; fourthly that he had lived openly in Kerman as a taxi driver for four years with ever present possibilities of ID checks; fifthly that if there had been any genuine fear of persecution he would have claimed asylum in Turkey or Greece, in which countries he had spent time amounting to about three months on his way to the United Kingdom; and there were various other reasons. As I say, Mr Lewis has been able to criticise some of those reasons quite cogently but this is a matter of credibility and one has to look at the overall picture; he may well be right to say that it can hardly matter whether a reason, political or otherwise, is given for disobedience, but for my own part I do not read the first reason as given by this tribunal as being critical to its decision. They were merely saying that as a matter of fact there was no political reason given. The main reason, obviously, why the tribunal disbelieved this applicant was that he had lived openly for four years in Iran as a taxi driver and that they considered that that was just inconsistent with any risk of persecution that there might have been from whatever the incident was which caused him to end up in hospital from which he escaped, if indeed escape he did.

One has to be realistic about these matters. Credibility is entirely a matter for the tribunal. Reasons may sometimes be given. Mr Lewis has also criticised the fact that they pointed out that there were no arrest warrants and he says, well, we do not expect arrest warrants to be in the possession of the applicant. But all these matters are peripheral to the central concern as I read the decision about credibility. That applies also to his main criticism in relation to the decision about the risk of persecution to an adulterer if he were returned.

Mr Lewis is able to make certain further criticisms of the decision, particularly the way that statements were compared or statements relied on which were originally in Farsi but were mistranslated and that sort of thing, but the central concern of the tribunal was to assess whether this story of having fallen in love with the wife of a local preacher was in fact true. The tribunal decided that the story was incredible. They gave reasons in paragraph 23 for saying that it was incredible. They considered that he had made the story up and there is in my view no prospect that this court would say that there was any error of law in the tribunal's approach, despite the criticisms that can be made of individual reasons, and so this application will have to be dismissed.

Order: Application refused