TG (Ethiopia) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

This is a renewed application for permission to appeal, permission having been refused on the papers by Laws LJ. The proposed appeal is against a decision of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal made by a senior immigration judge and an immigration judge, on reconsideration. The applicant is an Ethiopian of Oromo ethnicity. He is a graduate of Addis Abuba University and an accountant by profession.

His case for international protection is founded on his evidence that whilst at university he joined the OLF: then a legal but subsequently a prohibited organisation. He worked as an accountant for Ethiopian Airlines. However, he states that on 22 July 1995 he was arrested following an OLF meeting, detained for 45 days and tortured. He was then released on signing a declaration. He returned to his job with Ethiopian Airlines. Nevertheless, he continued his OLF activity clandestinely. He says that he organised a cell during the years between 1998 and 2002.

In September 2002 there was a bomb blast in Addis Abuba which was blamed on the OLF. A number of Oromo people were arrested. One was a cell member who, according to the applicant, under pressure of torture revealed the applicant’s name. The applicant discovered that he was wanted. He went into hiding and soon after that he left Ethiopia and eventually arrived in this country, where he has sought international protection.

His case failed before the AIT, substantially because of a strong adverse credibility finding as to his account of his personal history. The grounds of appeal proffered by Mr Stanage are numerous. One way or another they all amount to complaints either of insufficiency of reasoning or perversity on the part of the AIT. I shall deal as briefly as I can with the main aspects of the decision, the complaints about it and my conclusions upon those complaints. It is common ground that the events of 1995 -- the alleged detention and torture -- are central to the applicant’s case. The AIT did not accept his evidence about that period of time. For one thing, agreeing with the Secretary of State, the AIT considered it incredible that if the applicant had been detained and tortured as an OLF activist, he would have returned to work and worked in apparent security with a promise of promotion in the years following his arrest, given that his employment was with the state airline. It seems to me that that is a process of reasoning that was perfectly open to the AIT.

However, the matter does not rest there. Mr Stanage complains that, in coming to that conclusion, the AIT did not give appropriate consideration to the report of an expert witness, Dr Trueman. We have been through an exercise in textual exegesis with Mr Stanage as far as Dr Trueman’s report and the tribunal’s findings are concerned. In my judgment, whilst there maybe infelicities of expression in the conclusions of the AIT, it was entitled to come to the conclusion that Dr Trueman’s report did not provide “any real support for the appellant’s case in this regard.” The semantic disputes seem to me to be of no materiality. They surround an aspect of Dr Trueman’s evidence to the effect that OLF members are employed by the state airline and in other similar public authorities, and, whilst on the face of it that may seem surprising, it is less surprising when one considers the shortage of sufficiently qualified people in Ethiopia.

However, ultimately, Dr Trueman’s evidence on that point focuses on one unspecified person who, he says, was detained but nevertheless continued with the state airline following release. The AIT were not profoundly impressed by that because they found it vague and “little more than anecdotal.” In my judgment that is a view to which they were entitled, having regard to the fact that, as the tribunal pointed out, Dr Trueman’s evidence did not identify the role of the individual within the state airline, what he was detained for, when and for how long.

Mr Stanage then seeks to rely on another expert, Dr Dowson, who gave medical evidence about scarring and the like. It made no real impression on the AIT. Mr Stanage submitted that this may have been because the AIT misunderstood it. The AIT came to its conclusion in relation to Dr Dowson’s report because they found inconsistencies in the applicant’s accounts on various occasions, including the occasion when he was talking to Dr Dowson. The AIT said:

“Neither in interview nor in his SEF statement does he mention that he was beaten on the soles of his feet.”

Mr Stanage sought to identify that as a significant error because, he submitted, there had been mention in the SEF statement. On investigation it now transpires that the AIT was correct; there was no such mention either in interview or in the SEF statement. There was mention at a later stage in a statement prepared for the hearing in the AIT but that is the very point that the AIT was making when referring to inconsistency.

In the face of these unsatisfactory aspects of the appellant’s case, in my judgment the AIT was entitled to reject his account of the events of 1995 and no legal error has been identified in relation to that finding. The next phase of the evidence concerned the years after release in 1995 when the applicant said that he was coordinating the OLF cell. The AIT did not accept the fullness of his account of that. It considered that meetings were unlikely to have taken place in the places and in the manner described by the applicant. They concluded:

“We did not consider that the Appellant could satisfactorily explain what his 7 years’ active participation and secret OLF meetings actually involved. We do not find it credible that such meetings were held for so long and at such a risk for so little tangible result. The Appellant was very vague as to what was done or said at such meetings or what was done as a result of them.”

It seems to me that, again, that is an unassailable finding. The third matter is an incident in February 2002 which led to the appellant being suspected of people trafficking. He was stopped at Nairobi airport on suspicion that he was facilitating the illegal entry of another passenger to the United Kingdom. There has been a considerable amount of evidence about this relatively brief incident. Suffice it to say that the AIT’s findings upon it included a rejection of aspects of the applicant’s account on important matters, that rejection being founded upon identified inconsistencies and a finding of forgery of a letter said to have come from the state airline.

The fourth area of investigation concerns a letter or affidavit from an OLF official in Washington that was produced to the AIT. Some of it was general, but part of it referred to the membership and activities of the applicant. The AIT treated it with a degree of scepticism and, in my judgment, were entitled to come to the view that they did of it.

Fifthly, there is complaint about the treatment of qualified and respected experts. The AIT explains why it was attaching no or, in some cases, little weight to the evidence of the experts sought to be relied upon. It seems to me that those explanations cannot be said to suffer from insufficiency of reasoning. Although not raised by Mr Stanage orally, there is also, as I understand it, a complaint about the treatment by the AIT of the applicant’s account and the evidence of a witness in relation to activities of the applicant in this county since his arrival. The point he sought to make was that the applicant has been a high profile OLF activist in this county and would be recognised as such on his return to Ethiopia. Over a lengthy and well-reasoned passage, the AIT gave full reasons for attaching little significance to the account that had been given to it and for taking a fairly adverse view of the witness in question.

The final point made by Mr Stanage related to the fact that there is evidence that, upon return, the applicant will face prosecution for the events at Nairobi airport in 2002. The point to make about that is the one made by the AIT, namely that that is an allegation of a criminal offence. If it is sustainable accusation it will no doubt result in a conviction, but we can form no view about that any more than the AIT could form a final view. The AIT came to the conclusion that there was no reasonable likelihood that the applicant would not receive a fair hearing in relation to that. It was not a political matter in the usual sense of that expression, and it gives rise to no need for international protection.

I have come to the conclusion that none of the grounds advanced by Mr Stanage -- based as they are on contentions of perversity or insufficiency of reasoning -- is sustainable; and I do not consider that any appeal would have a real prospect of success. Like Laws LJ who dealt with the matter on paper, I would refuse the application.

I agree. The application therefore will be dismissed.