RN -v- Secretary of State for the Home Department (anonymity order)
CivilImmigration and Asylum Chamber (Upper Tribunal)TribunalsAnonymity Order
Case number: JR-2024-BHM-000120
In the Upper Tribunal
(Immigration and Asylum Chamber)
Judicial Review
In the matter of an application for permission to apply for Judicial Review
5 December 2024
Before:
Upper Tribunal Judge Blundell
Between:
The King
on the application of
RN
-v-
Secretary of State for the Home Department
Order
NOTIFICATION of the Judge’s decision (UT rule 30(1))
Following consideration of the documents lodged by the applicant and the Acknowledgement of Service filed by the respondent
Order by Upper Tribunal Judge Blundell:
Anonymity is ordered. The applicant shall be referred to by the initials RN throughout these proceedings. No one shall publish or reveal the name or address of the applicant or publish or reveal any information which would be likely to lead to the identification of the applicant in connection with these proceedings.
Permission is refused.
Reasons
(1) The applicant seeks permission to apply for judicial review of the respondent’s decision to refuse to treat his further submissions as a fresh claim for asylum.
(2) The applicant is a Rwandan national who has a lengthy immigration history which I need not rehearse. It is common ground that he is a person to whom paragraph 353 of the Immigration Rules applied, in that a previous asylum claim had been refused and an appeal against that claim was no longer pending. It was therefore for the respondent to determine whether the submissions he made amounted to a fresh claim.
(3) The further submissions related to sur place activities undertaken by the applicant in the United Kingdom. The respondent did not accept, in summary, that those activities, when taken at their highest, generated a realistic prospect of success.
(4) That conclusion is criticised in ground one, in which it is submitted that the respondent failed to give ‘sufficient consideration’ to letters which were written in support of the applicant by two gentlemen: Noble Marara and Jean Pierre Mushimiye.
(5) The respondent considered those letters at some length. Insofar as they spoke to activities undertaken by the applicant in the UK, the respondent took the letters at their highest and proceeded to consider whether those activities would give rise to risk on return. The respondent noted what was said in both letters about the risk to the applicant on return, but rejected that evidence because the authors were not country experts. She preferred the information she cited in the decision, which suggested that low-level political activists were not at risk.
(6) That conclusion was unarguably open to the material available to the respondent at the date of decision. The background evidence from the Electronic Information Network which appears in the bundle was clearly downloaded shortly before this claim was issued, and cannot found a proper complaint in public law. This is not an appeal, and what the Upper Tribunal is concerned to decide is whether the respondent made an arguable public law error on the material before her at the time of the decision. That evidence is not capable of showing that the respondent erred, whether in relation to the risk to RNC members or to those associated with Mr Marara. The first ground therefore discloses no arguable public law error.
(7) The second ground misrepresents the law. It is submitted that the applicant’s further submissions amounted to a protection or human rights claim as a matter of law. But that submission was considered and rejected by the Supreme Court in R (Robinson) v SSHD [2019] UKSC 11, which is not referred to in the applicant’s grounds.
Costs
(8) The applicant will pay the respondent’s costs of £976, subject to any representations in writing to be received within 9 days of the date on which this order is sent.
(9) Costs follow the event in judicial review and the sum claimed is reasonable. I therefore assess the respondent’s costs summarily in that sum.
Signed:
Mark Blundell
Upper Tribunal Judge Blundell
Dated:
5 December 2024