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

The appellant renews his application for permission to appeal against the dismissal of his asylum and human rights appeal by Immigration Judge Shimmin in July 2007. To put the appellant out of his suspense I must tell him at once that I am not able to allow his application and I must now very briefly explain why.

He is a citizen of Rwanda. He arrived in the UK on 22 May 2001. He claimed asylum on 25 May 2001. The claim was refused. He appealed and his appeal was originally heard by Immigration Judge Howard in June 2006. That tribunal accepted the appellant’s account of events but found that he would not be at risk on return to Rwanda and therefore dismissed his appeal. Goldring J ordered reconsideration. On the first stage reconsideration, the Senior Immigration Judge found that there was an error of law in that the judge had failed to address relevant issues. He directed that there should be a full rehearing, except that the original judge’s finding about the appellant’s nationality should stand. On second stage reconsideration the immigration judge rejected the appellant’s account of his alleged ill-treatment in Rwanda and dismissed his appeal.

The appellant has produced his own grounds of appeal in which he seeks to raise a large number of reasons why the immigration judge’s decision should be reversed. To a large extent they are complaints about the factual conclusions arrived at by the immigration judge, but they were conclusions which were open to him on the evidence and they did not involve any error of law. He also seeks to put forward an Article 8 claim based on his state of health. But that was not advanced as a separate basis of claim before the immigration judge. I have, however, read the medical evidence in the bundle relied upon by the appellant in support of that claim, in particular, a report by a cognitive therapist in Leeds dated 31 July 2006. In that report he describes the appellant’s state of mental health and records that he is currently taking Citalopram, as the appellant has confirmed in his oral submissions before me.

Having read that material, I do not consider that, if it had been before the immigration judge and relied on as a separate basis of an Article 8 claim, it would have had any real prospects of success. The appellant has asked me to exercise the court’s power to allow his appeal to go forward. In his oral submissions this morning he has emphasised that he now has no family in Rwanda and that he is in poor mental health. My role today is a very limited one. That is to see whether there is any real prospect of the appellant being able to show that Immigration Judge Shimmin erred in law in reaching the findings that he did. I do not have any wider discretion than that and, in my judgment, there is no real prospect of the appellant being able to show that there was any error of law by that tribunal. For those reasons, disappointing as this is to the appellant, this application must be refused.