United Kingdom Asylum and Immigration Tribunal

 


E v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Ethiopia) [2002] UKIAT 01963

CC-49220-01

IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM TRIBUNAL

Date of hearing: 20/05/2002

Date Determination notified: 14 June 2002

Before
John Freeman (Chair) Mr GJ Brown
Between

E	APPELLANT
and
Secretary of State for the Home Department	RESPONDENT

Representation: Mr C Williams (counsel instructed by Ziadies) for the appellant. Mr M Pichamuthu for the respondent.
DETERMINATION AND REASONS
1. This is an appeal from a decision of an adjudicator (Mr PJ Bryant), sitting at Hatton Cross on 22 January, dismissing an asylum and human rights appeal by a citizen of Ethiopia, from refusal of leave to enter on 4 May 2001. Leave was given only on the basis of whether the appellant would face any real risk on return as the child of a former officer under the Dergue (Mengistu) régime: the adjudicator's negative credibility findings on her individual case-history were specifically upheld.
2. As most people with any interest in the subject still remember, the Mengistu régime fell in 1991. While there is certainly evidence, to which Mr Williams was able to refer us, that persons who had taken an active rôle in it may still be at risk, especially if suspected of involvement in the numerous atrocities which took place under it, he was quite unable to point to anything in the background evidence which supported any risk for their family members as such. The nearest he was able to get was by referring us to the decision of another adjudicator. As he was well aware, a recent practice direction forbids the citation of adjudicator decisions as authority: this was not of course the purpose here, but we may have something to say about the use of adjudicator decisions as factual material.
3. The decision in question is Tekleabe (CC 51192/99): the adjudicator was Ms AC McGavin. Mr Williams very frankly acknowledged that it was not based on any background evidence as to risk faced by family members of Dergue officers, but on a finding as to the credibility of the individual case, which was different from the present one in a number of ways. It concerned a much older lady, who had herself been a treasurer of the Mengistu party women's association, and involved with AAPO [All Amhara People's Association] since the fall of the Dergue. Though no doubt it was a decision the adjudicator was entitled to reach on the facts of the individual case, we do not think it shows any general risk for family members of Mengistu officers.
4. It sometimes happens that adjudicators are asked to consider a whole raft of favourable decisions on appellants from the country in question which the industrious practitioner concerned has managed to secure from their colleagues. (The unfavourable ones are allowed to pass into obscurity). We do not consider this a proper practice: even though the decisions are being relied on as fact, not law, the adjudicator who wrote them will have had no opportunity of independent verification of the facts, as enjoyed by the various government and international organizations whose reports are familiar in these cases.
5. If the decision which was to be relied on is based on background evidence, then that evidence itself should be produced; if not, it is no reliable guide to the general situation. While there may be a limited place for referring adjudicators to previous decisions on close family members or comrades of an appellant, where the findings of fact may have some actual bearing on the individual case concerned, we do not think that adjudicator decisions should ever be cited as of general application, on the facts any more than on the law.

Appeal dismissed

John Freeman