JM (Rwanda) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

This is a renewed application for permission to appeal a decision of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, given on 10 February 2006. The applicant is a native of Rwanda. She arrived in the United Kingdom on 2 August 2000 and claimed asylum on 9 August 2000. A decision was made refusing her claim for asylum and human rights on 3 February 2004.

The decision accompanied a letter from the Secretary of State for the Home Department, setting out the grounds of refusal. That is dated 30 January 2004. Essentially the Secretary of State did not accept the applicant’s account of what had happened to her in Rwanda and how she came to be in this country. Her appeal was rejected by an adjudicator on 2 July 2004, but leave to appeal was granted.

By the time the matter came to a substantive appeal, the Immigration Appeal Tribunal had merged with the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. There was a second stage hearing ordered and it is against the second stage hearing decision that this applicant applies for leave to appeal. That decision was promulgated on 10 February 2006.

In its written decision the AIT found that the applicant’s evidence was not credible. The first 21 paragraphs of the decision deal with the applicant’s evidence and cross-examination and also included evidence given by experts called on her behalf. Originally there were five grounds of appeal. As a result of the refusal by Buxton LJ on paper, only three now survive. They challenge the findings by the AIT as to credibility. I do not propose to set out all of those grounds in detail. They are, in summary, ground 1, which is really a criticism of the fact that the tribunal, it is said, ignored reports of Dr Eltringham and a medical report of Dr Frank’s. It is upon that ground that the application for leave is based today.

What is submitted on behalf of the applicant by Miss Naik is that the tribunal in paragraph 26 of its decision was wrong to criticise the fact that the applicant had not described injuries to her solicitor. Miss Naik also relies on the fact that, as she submits, the solicitors were negligent in failing to obtain a medical report. It is a fact that when Dr Frank saw the applicant, he noted that she had scars which were over two years old and the tribunal noted that it was, in any event, more than four years after the events which purportedly caused them that Dr Frank examined the applicant.

What is submitted on behalf of the applicant today is that she cannot be criticised for that; it was her solicitor’s fault and, in any event, in the contemporaneous documents of her application to the Home Office, she mentions that she had those injuries. In my judgment, this really misses the point that the tribunal was making. What it said with, in my view, obvious force, was that if the applicant was so badly beaten only 11 days before she arrived in this country, it would not need a doctor to see that she had been badly injured. In any event it was to be expected that immediately she arrived, she would go to see a doctor or to go to a hospital. There is no evidence that she did either.

In my judgment, this was a very valid point being made by the tribunal and it is not overcome by a submission that it was her solicitor’s fault that no medical report was obtained at the time that an application was made to the Home Department.

The next point that is made is that the tribunal failed properly to deal with the expert evidence of Dr Eltringham. But as Buxton LJ pointed out when refusing permission:

Generally speaking as to that ground and the two other grounds, in my opinion it is quite clear that the tribunal did consider Dr Eltringham’s report in so far as he and Dr Frank were seeking to say that the applicant was credible, which they appeared to be doing at some stage in the reports. That was a matter for the tribunal to decide and not the experts. In my judgment, for the reasons given by Buxton LJ, there is nothing perverse or unreasonable in the findings of the tribunal. They are clearly set out and detail some nine reasons as to why it found the applicant’s evidence not credible.

In the circumstances, in my judgment, this application must be refused. Thank you very much, Miss Naik.