Ireland - High Court, 8 April 2011, M.A.M.A. v Refugee Appeals Tribunal [2011] IEHC 147

The Court (Cooke J.) held that reliance on a judgment of the House of Lords relating to the return of Darfuris to Sudan was not a sufficient consideration of the prospective risk faced by the applicant:

“It is of course, entirely appropriate having regard to the common basis which the asylum laws and procedures of different countries have in the provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1951 that the Courts should have regard to and rely upon relevant judgments given in different jurisdictions. That is particularly the case for the national courts of the Member States of the European Union where both the substantive and procedural provisions for the asylum process are informed by the aims of the Common European Asylum System and circumscribed by the common provisions of the Council Directives 2004/83/EC and 2005/85/EC on minimum standards for qualification and for procedures in refugee matters. In the view of this Court, however, it is prudent that such reliance be confined to questions of interpretation of law. Reports of cases in other jurisdictions are not, in the view of this Court, an acceptable source of information as to factual conditions in a country of origin. For one thing, the facts upon which a decided case which has reached a law report was based will invariably predate the circumstances under consideration in the case in which the decided case is sought to be relied upon. A decision-maker must be alive to the fact that in regions, from which refugees may have fled, conditions are likely to be volatile and regimes may change and re-change within relatively short periods of time. Thus, it may be unwise to suppose that because a particular location was regarded in one case as being safe for repatriation in, say, 2004, that it will necessarily have remained safe two years later. The Court does not regard, therefore, the reliance placed upon this judgment of the House of Lords as being an adequate manner in which to address the issue as to the prospective risk to an applicant in a case of this kind.”

“ ... if the finding on credibility goes so far as to reject a claim that the asylum seeker has a particular nationality or ethnicity or that he or she comes from a particular region or place in which the source of the claimed persecution is said to exist, there may be no obligation upon the decision-maker to engage in “reasonable speculation” as to the risk of repatriation in the case. On the other hand, if the decision-maker concludes that the asylum seeker is opportunistically seeking to place himself in the context of verifiable events in a particular place but decides that while such events did occur, the asylum seeker was not involved in them, the risk of future persecution may still require to be examined if there are elements (the language spoken or obvious familiarity with the locality for example) which establish a connection with that place. Thus, opportunistic lying about participation in events involving previous persecution will not necessarily foreclose or obviate the need to consider the risk of future persecution provided there are some elements which furnish a basis for making that assessment.”