IC (Turkey) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

This is a renewed application for permission to appeal from a determination of Designated Immigration Judge Billingham, which was heard in January 2008. The appellant, Mr C, is a citizen of the Republic of Turkey. I am not quite clear when he arrived in this country but he has certainly been engaged in the immigration process since at least the beginning of 2007. Throughout that period he has claimed protection under the Refugee Convention and also in respect of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, the designated immigration judge considered that if the Refugee Convention claim failed, the human rights claim went with it and it has not been suggested that he was wrong in taking that view. Therefore I deal solely with the Refugee Convention matter.

Mr C was understood by Designated Immigration Judge Billingham to claim that he feared persecution on three grounds: first of all his Kurdish ethnicity; secondly his religious belief; and thirdly his association with the KKP. It has been urged on us this morning by Miss Degirmenci, who has appeared I think for Mr C more or less throughout these proceedings, that the immigration judge was wrong to consider those matters as it were separately, as he did in his determination; he should have looked at the matters as a whole. The problem about that submission is that if the immigration judge is not persuaded that there is a risk factor in respect of any particular element, be it ethnicity, or be it religion, or be it political association, he cannot put that element into his overall consideration. If a ground does not stand up on its own it cannot be added to other grounds in order to make the case better. I therefore will follow the example of the designated immigration judge and consider the complaints that are made about his determination seriatim.

I do not set out the facts and the evidence. They are all contained in the determination. Although this case is very important to the gentleman concerned, I cannot see any element in it that has any further interest beyond its boundaries. Anybody who needs to know more about it can read what Designated Immigration Judge Billingham said.

I come to the three issues. So far as Mr C’s Kurdish origins and religious beliefs are concerned, the immigration judge was distinctly unimpressed by Mr C’s claims as to his association with and devotion to the Kurdish way of life and language. He found it very surprising that Mr C showed before him so little understanding of those matters. And similarly, with regard to his religious beliefs, the immigration judge recorded that there was no evidence before him that Mr C himself had ever been discriminated against because of his Alevi faith and also recorded that the objective facts with regard to the country information did not support any claim that an Alevi was necessarily going to be persecuted on return. It was also relevant for the judge to say, as he did, that Mr C appears whilst in this country to have shown no interest either in his religion or in his claimed political allegiance to the KKP, which, in the immigration judge’s view, demonstrated that those matters were not important in his life and were not in themselves going to cause trouble when he returned to Turkey.

I have set all that out because Miss Degirmenci, perhaps understandably, did not seek to criticise, as I understood it, any of those conclusions. Certainly she did not put them in the forefront of her argument. They are, however important, because they set the scene for the approach that the immigration judge took to what is said to be now the centre point of Mr C’s case. He alleged that his father was a prominent member of the KKP and had been targeted by the authorities on that ground and claimed that he himself, Mr C, had been arrested, fingerprinted on two occasions in connection with a political meeting or meetings attended by his father, and had been ill-treated to the extent of persecution during one of those detentions.

Giving a fair reading to paragraphs 18 and 19 of the immigration judge’s determination, as we are told in this court to do, not least by the guidance given to us by the House of Lords in the case of AH (Sudan) v SSHD [2007] UKHL 49, it is clear to me that the immigration judge did not feel able to rely really on anything that he had been told by Mr C about those matters. The criticism that is made of him is that he did not express himself sufficiently clearly in rejecting that part of Mr C’s case and that therefore the case ought to proceed on the basis of the findings that Immigration Judge Billingham in fact made.

My view of this is that the immigration judge showed a certain diffidence in approach, which has led to these complaints and which might have been avoided had he expressed himself differently. However, in fairness to Mr C, I will take the matters at face value, as Miss Degirmenci has asked us to do. So far as the detention is concerned, which is the main matter upon which Miss Degirmenci concentrated, the judge said this in paragraph 17:

“The appellant may have been with his father at a political meeting or at the Nevroz celebrations, but I do not consider that his minor participation would have led to the treatment he described. Furthermore, no charges were laid against the appellant which would have shown up on the computer records available through the GPTS system [that is the system at Ankara airport] were the Appellant to return”

And he then said this at paragraph 19:

“I found that except for the two claimed arrests during which time the Appellant claimed to have been persecuted, there was little evidence to suggest that the Appellant was targeted for his race, religion and politics. For reasons already given, I do not accept that the treatment claimed by the Appellant which he received upon arrest to be believable as at no time was he formally charged with any offence and even the Appellant’s father was released on condition that he became an informer. The Appellant would ask us to believe that the father did not wish to leave the country even though he was alleged to be more implicated in the political party more than the Appellant. I am unable to accept that the father was still on the run, only visiting the Appellant’s mother at night infrequently.”

Miss Degirmenci says that although the immigration judge rejected as untrue, and clearly rejected as untrue, the claims of Mr C to have been tortured on arrest, by what he said there he did accept that he was arrested on two occasions and also fingerprinted. I do not think that he did accept that. He describes all that evidence as “claims”, not as anything more, but even assuming that the judge should be read as accepting those arrests, there is no ground whatsoever for saying that he erred in thinking that that history, even if it were made good, would lead to Convention persecution directed at the appellant. There are myriad reasons for that, the first being those set out by the judge, that he was not charged with any offence and his father (albeit, it is said, being required to act as an informer) did not suffer any other persecution even though, on the evidence, he is far more implicatedin the KKP than is Mr C himself. Also it is found by the judge and not challenged that this would not lead to a record being kept so that he was identified on return.

Miss Degirmenci says that there was evidence that local records might be relied on in order to identify Mr C. In view of what the judge found about his extremely low profile in his local area, again not accepting Mr C’s evidence on that point, that must be significantly unlikely; but even if he was identified, there is nothing in the treatment that he has received so far to suggest that persecutory treatment of a level required for the Refugee Convention -- as opposed to inconvenience, ill manners and hostility -- would be directed at him even if his previous arrests, if they took place, were identified.

I therefore do not think that there is any way in which the Court of Appeal could differ from the conclusion of the adjudicator. As I say, I have a strong suspicion that if he were asked to re-reason this judgment he would put it in terms very much more strongly unhelpful to Mr C than in fact it is at present expressed; but, even on that expression, and giving the best construction of it in Mr C’s interests as Miss Degirmenci has invited us to do, I can see no ground upon which this decision could be challenged.

I therefore would not grant permission.

I entirely agree.