IS (Somalia) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

Ms Hulse appears this morning in order to renew the application of this middle-aged man from Somalia for permission to appeal. Longmore LJ refused permission on sight of the papers because, in short, this was all fact and the applicant had been disbelieved.

The problem is that for the second time he appears to have been disbelieved, in many ways, quite cavalierly. He was able for example to answer all the detailed questions put to him about the sub-sub-clan of which he claimed membership, but he had been disbelieved at different stages both about that clan membership and about persecution which he recounted, both by the majority tribe who are known oppressors of this sub-clan and by religious fundamentalists. Despite the fact that none of those forms of oppression conflicted as far as one knows with the in-country information, the Home Office disbelieved the applicant. The first Immigration Judge did so too, omitting to refer, however, to any of the in-country material. He was eventually overset by Senior Immigration Judge Batiste, who directed full reconsideration, and it is against the result of the reconsideration by Immigration Judge Olson that he now seeks once more to appeal.

Immigration Judge Olson disbelieved him on a quite different basis from the first Immigration Judge. He begins by analysing and rejecting the applicant’s personal story and for that reason then disbelieves his claimed clanship. He does the latter, however, without any reference to the fact that the applicant had demonstrated a detailed knowledge of the clan’s structure. That seems to me in itself to be arguably an error of law, both in terms of the mode of approach and in terms of the omission.

Immigration Judge Olson, however, disbelieved the applicant’s own story for a variety of reasons. He did not think that the applicant could have gone for so long unscathed after 1991 as a minority clan member. There was no apparent reason, said the Immigration Judge, why his majority clan neighbours should have supported him as for many years he said they did. Why, the Immigration Judge asked, should only the applicant and his family, out of all the available possible victims, have been taken for forced labour? Why did the majority clan neighbours not stop that happening? Seven years forced labour, the Immigration Judge thought, was not credible “in the light of” the account given by the applicant of his eventual release by a new camp commander who took the “risk” of letting the applicant and his family go. The account of being “simply allowed to escape” by throwing himself down when his nephew and his nephew’s wife were shot by zealots was, said the Immigration Judge, not believable. And lastly the applicant’s account of meeting a fellow clan member who was therefore a distant relation at a London mosque “simply stretched the imagination”.

There is, I have to say, by this stage a depressing sense that whatever this man says he is not going to be believed. One’s inclination in the face of such apparent obduracy is to encourage him to give up and go home; but the fact is -- and Ms Hulse’s presence here today reminds one of it -- that he is entitled like any other individual not to have simple events which sort perfectly well with human experience and with other evidence dismissed summarily as fabrications. He is entitled to have all the evidence, both for and against him, logically assembled and dispassionately evaluated. I think it is arguable that once again he has not had that elementary entitlement.

Although I would not hold out great hopes for him and although this court does sometimes despair at cases coming yet again around the same circuit, and although no system of law can guarantee to get every decision right, our law does guarantee everyone a fair hearing and an objective decision. It is arguable that in spite of a Home Office decision and two determinations against him on the merits, the applicant has not yet had the latter of these, an objective decision on his case.

I will grant permission to appeal accordingly.