Tribunal decisions

The decision

Upper Tribunal
(Immigration and Asylum Chamber) Appeal Number: pa/10658/2016

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Heard at Bradford
Decision & Reasons Promulgated
On 4 April 2017
On 24 April 2017

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE CLIVE LANE

Between

doung quynh nguyen
(ANONYMITY DIRECTION not made)
Appellant
and

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Not present or represented
For the Respondent: Mrs Pettersen, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

DECISION AND REASONS
1. The appellant Doung Quynh Nguyen, was born on 10 December 1993 and is a female citizen of Vietnam. The appellant claimed that she had received telephone threats in Vietnam from a man to whom her parents owed money. The appellant entered the United Kingdom on the last occasion in 2013 in order to study here. At the end of her limited leave to remain (March 2014) she had not attempted to regularise her residence. She claimed asylum after she was arrested following an enforcement visit at a residential address on 30 August 2016. Her application was refused by a decision of the respondent dated 28 September 2016. The appeal to the First-tier Tribunal (Judge Bird) which, in a decision promulgated 18 November 2016, dismissed the appeal. She now appeals, with permission, to the Upper Tribunal.
2. The appellant did not attend the Upper Tribunal hearing at Bradford on 4 April 2017. The court file indicates that a notice of the hearing was served on the appellant and her solicitors by first class post on 15 January 2017. Neither the appellant nor her representatives have responded in any way to the service of the notice of hearing. There is no indication from the file that the appellant has changed her address or that the notice of hearing has failed to reach her or her solicitors at their respective last notified addresses. I am satisfied that notice of hearing has come to the attention of the appellant and that she has failed to provide any or any satisfactory explanation for her failure to attend the haring. In the circumstances, I proceeded with the hearing in the appellant’s absence.
3. The grounds assert that the judge failed to understand the evidence. At [15], the judge had referred to a “man who she says owes money to her parents”; the appellant’s claim was that her parents owed the man money. The appellant’s evidence in cross-examination had been that she first received threats in 2014 and last received them in 2015. The judge at [15] arguably failed to understand the appellant’s evidence noting that, “the appellant said she had not meant that [the threats] had [occurred] for the first time in 2016 but it was the last time but then she said that they had started in 2015”. The judge noted that there had been “a great deal of confusion about this very cogent bit of evidence” [16]. Judge Froom, who granted permission to appeal, restricted a grant to the error arguably perpetrated by Judge Bird by wrongly recording the evidence and relying “on inconsistencies which did not exist”.
4. It was unfortunate the judge appears to have misunderstood parts of the appellant’s evidence. However, it is important to consider those possible errors in the context of the claim as a whole. It has to be said that this is an extremely weak asylum claim. Quite properly, the judge had drawn attention to the fact that the appellant made no mention of the fears she had of returning to Vietnam either during the course of her student visa or subsequently after that visa expired and she remained living illegally in the United Kingdom. Very significantly as regards the credibility of her claim, the appellant only made an asylum claim at all after she was arrested during an enforcement visit. Moreover, the judge made findings which are wholly unconnected with any error as to the appellant’s account but which plainly justifying the judge placing no reliance at all upon the appellant’s credibility. At [19], the judge notes that:
when she was first encountered the appellant appears to have told the authorities that she left China in 2014, travelled by vehicle and foot into France before arriving in the United Kingdom concealed in a lorry on 18 September 2014. This however was not true because the appellant came here as a student”
That is a finding which has not been challenged and which in itself would justify the conclusion that the appellant was a wholly unreliable witness. Moreover, as the judge observes at [20] even if the appellant’s claim about her parents’ money problems is true, there is no evidence whatever to indicate that the money lender would know that the appellant returned to Vietnam or that he would seek to kill the appellant or indeed traffic her to China as a prostitute. The claim is fanciful in the extreme. It is so devoid of credibility that it would not arguably succeed following any new analysis based on any reassessment of the appellant’s account of past events. Even if that the judge did inaccurately record the evidence and may, in consequence, have erred in law, I find, in the light of the First-tier Tribunal’s other findings and my assessment of the credibility of the claim in general, that this is an appeal in which I should exercise my discretion not to set aside the First-tier Tribunal decision. Accordingly, the appeal is dismissed.
Notice of Decision

This appeal is dismissed.

No anonymity direction is made.

Signed Date 20 April 2017

Upper Tribunal Judge Clive Lane

TO THE RESPONDENT
FEE AWARD

I have dismissed the appeal and therefore there can be no fee award.

Signed Date 20 April 2017

Upper Tribunal Judge Clive Lane