Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2024-003657

LP/02703/2024

PA/63113/2023

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:
11th August 2025

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE BRUCE

Between

KQ (Iraq)
Appellant
AND

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:

For the Appellant: Ms Kadic, Elder Rahimi Solicitors
For the Respondent: Mr McVeety, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 31 January 2025

Anonymity

Unless and until a tribunal or court directs otherwise, the Appellant is granted anonymity. No report of these proceedings shall directly or indirectly identify him, any of his witnesses or any member of his family. This direction applies to, amongst others, both the Appellant and the Respondent. Failure to comply with this direction could lead to contempt of court proceedings

DECISION AND REASONS

1. The Appellant is an Iraqi national born in 1982. Dependent to his claim are his wife and four children. On the 5th June 2024, the First-Tier Tribunal (Judge Ficklin) allowed his appeal on protection grounds. The Secretary of State now has permission to appeal against that decision.

Background and Matters in Issue
2. The basis of the claim is that the Appellant and his family are at risk in Iraq from a powerful figure in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The Appellant, his wife and this man, whom I shall refer to as ‘B’ all worked for the same company in the Kurdish region of Iraq. The Appellant’s wife worked closely with B. In 2019, B began making serious sexual advances towards her. She repeatedly rejected him. B would not be deterred. He continued to harass her, and then her family, by issuing threats against them, including kidnapping or death. It was for this reason that the family left Iraq and sought asylum in the United Kingdom in June 2021.
3. The Secretary of State rejected the claim on credibility grounds. The refusal letter identified a number of inconsistencies in the evidence, and prior to the hearing before the FTT, the Home Office review identified some more. The Respondent’s case before the Tribunal was that these inconsistencies revealed the account to be a fabrication, and it was on this central basis that she invited the Tribunal to dismiss the appeal.
4. Judge Ficklin rejected the Home Office submissions on credibility. He heard oral evidence from both the Appellant and his wife, which he describes in his decision as “robust and detailed”. He found this evidence to be consistent with what they had said before. He accepted that the Appellant’s wife has been harassed at work by a powerful PUK member who now posed a threat to the family. On this basis, the appeal was allowed.
5. The central ground of appeal advanced by the Secretary of State is that Judge Ficklin gave insufficient reasons for his findings: in particular he did not expressly address the inconsistencies identified by the Respondent as the reason why the claim was rejected. This he was obliged to do: Budhathoki (reasons for decisions) [2014] UKUT 00341 (IAC).

Ground 1: Reasons
6. It is obvious from Judge Ficklin’s decision that he found both the Appellant and his wife to be wholly credible. It is obvious because he repeatedly says so. He notes that the overall claim is plausible, he finds it to be generally supported by the country background material. He finds that the Appellant and witness gain credit for not embellishing their claims, and as I have said, found their evidence, under cross-examination, to hold up well.
7. The Secretary of State nevertheless contends that she does not understand the reasons for his conclusions. The refusal letter has raised several inconsistencies, which the Home Office say went to the heart of the Appellant’s evidence. Mr McVeety says that even in a short-form decision, the Respondent was entitled to have that case met, and the conclusions explained. Before me, Mr McVeety accepted that not all of the points raised in the refusal letter were necessarily good ones, but he maintained that there were four which, being fundamental to the credibility of the claim, should have been addressed:
• In his substantive asylum interview, the Appellant said that B had threatened to kill him in August 2020, ambushing him as he left his workplace. He did not, however, mention this confrontation in the ACQ. This is deemed ‘a significant inconsistency’.
• In the asylum interview, the Appellant had said, at questions 53 to 54, that there had been no threats against him or his family since August 2020. However, later in the interview, he said that B had been to his place of work in search of him on two occasions in 2021.
• In the ACQ the Appellant described B as having “very strong links to the PUK” whereas in his asylum interview said “he is a member of the PUK”.
• In the asylum interview, the Appellant described B’s role in the company as “processing applications” but elsewhere in the interview, suggested that B worked for the PUK, covering up illegal activities and killing people.
8. Mr McVeety relies on Budhathoki to submit that if Judge Ficklin did not agree with these points, he should have explained why:
“It is… Necessary for judges to identify and resolve key conflicts in the evidence and explain in clear and brief terms their reasons, so that the parties can understand why they have won or lost.”
9. I have read the decision of Judge Ficklin as a whole. I note that at his paragraph 3, Judge Ficklin recognises that the refusal letter gives reasons why the Home Office found the claim not to be credible. I also note that at his paragraph 10, he records the submissions made about inconsistencies in the evidence. At his paragraph 11, he then says this: “I do not accept the Respondent’s assertion that their accounts are not detailed and consistent”.
10. It seems to me that Judge Ficklin plainly understood what the Home Office case was. It is also abundantly clear that he rejected it.
11. That said, I do accept Mr McVeety’s submission that Judge Ficklin does not expressly deal with the “inconsistencies” identified. Having considered the alleged inconsistencies, in the context of this decision as a whole, I am not satisfied that it matters. None of the points made are good ones, and I am not satisfied that any, or all of them, were capable of outweighing the combined evidence of the two witnesses, found by Judge Ficklin to have been “robust and detailed”.
12. I am troubled by the first point made on the Secretary of State’s behalf. On 7th July 2023, the Appellant was asked to complete an online questionnaire described in the papers before me as an “ACQ”. Mr McVeety tells me that this stands for ‘asylum claim questionnaire’, and explained that it is akin to what was once called a ‘screening interview’. I have been shown the document. Like a screening interview, the applicant is asked to give biographical details and a basic outline of the claim. One of the questions is ‘what do you fear in your country?’. In response to that question, the Appellant gives a broad brushstroke summary of his claim. He is then, in the first of the credibility points relied upon here, criticised for later giving more detailed evidence about the harassment and threats that he and his wife endured. I am not at all satisfied that it is appropriate to draw an adverse inference from this alleged discrepancy. It has long been recognised that these short initial interviews serve a different purpose from the substantive asylum interview. At this initial stage claimants are not expected to set out, in great detail, the basis of their claim, and it cannot therefore be fair, or logical, for them to subsequently be criticised for a failure to do so: YL (China) [2004] UKIAT 00145.
13. In respect of the second alleged inconsistency set out above, there is to my mind an obvious distinction between a direct verbal threat, and B visiting the Appellant’s workplace when he was not there. I am not therefore satisfied that this is an inconsistency at all.
14. Similarly, I do not find there to be any discrepancy in the Appellant’s evidence that B had ‘strong links’ with the PUK, or that he was a member. The two are not mutually exclusive.
15. As to the final point relied upon, this was taken for the first time in the Respondent’s review of the evidence before the First-tier Tribunal. Not for the first time, I am driven to remark that the point of these reviews is not to think up new reasons for refusal. Mr McVeety defended the practice by pointing out that the purpose of these pre-hearing reviews is to respond to evidence submitted in the appeal by the appellant. If that evidence reveals new flaws in the appellant’s case, it is of course quite proper that the Respondent is able to comment on that. This is not however what happened here. This allegation, that there is inconsistency in the Appellant’s evidence about B’s employment, arises entirely from his asylum interview. In any event, again, I am not satisfied that there is any discrepancy here. Presumably the Appellant does not mean to suggest that B was officially employed to commit human rights abuses on behalf of the PUK, but that is nevertheless what he ‘did’, whilst working a ‘day job’ in the electricity company.
16. Having considered the decision, the grounds of appeal and Mr McVeety’s submissions, I am not satisfied that the omission to deal with these submissions point-by-point was in any way material.intend that I am further satisfied that the reasons given by the Tribunal are, overall, clear.

Ground 2: Convention Reason
17. The grounds take a further issue, which I can deal with shortly.
18. At paragraph 7 the grounds read “the Tribunal has failed to identify what Convention reason this appeal has been allowed under”. In his grant of permission dated 24 October 2024 Upper Tribunal Judge Hoffman says this: “I am satisfied the respondent has identified an arguable material error of law in relation to the judge’s approach to whether the appellant and his wife’s claim engages the Refugee Convention“.
19. Looking at the grounds, and looking at the decision, it seems to me that Judge Hoffman makes the remark that he does because he is under the impression that an issue in the appeal was whether the claim engages the Refugee Convention. Had that been the case, this ground would certainly have been arguable, since Judge Ficklin does not, it is true, offer any reasoning for his conclusion at his paragraph 21 “that the Appellants are at risk in Iraq for a Refugee Convention reason”.
20. This was not, however, an issue in the appeal. Under the heading ‘Convention reasons that apply to your asylum claim’ in the refusal letter there are six boxes: one for each of the Convention reasons, and one marked ‘non-Convention reason’. There is a cross in the box ‘member of a particular social group’ and the accompanying text reads:
“Iraqi women fleeing sexual violence are considered members of a particular social group under the Refugee Convention. You state that the persecution against your wife extends to your whole family. Therefore this Convention reason can be applied to your family’s asylum claim”,
21. As I note above, there was a Respondent’s review in this case. At paragraph 4 thereof, the Respondent sets out the schedule of issues from the Appellant’s skeleton argument. There then follows a further 48 paragraphs of counter schedule. Nowhere, in any of this, is a dispute raised as to whether this claim engages the Refugee Convention. The first time that this issue has been raised is in the grounds of appeal to this Tribunal, grounds which appear to have fundamentally misled Judge Hoffman.
22. It follows that I need not say anything else about this ground, save to record the parties’ agreement that this being a claim made prior to the commencement of the Nationality Asylum and Borders Act 2022, it is the common-law definition of particular social group that the Tribunal must apply: EMAP (gang violence: Convention reason [2022] UKUT 00335 (IAC). That being the case it was legally permissible for the Respondent to treat the claimants as ‘members of a particular social group’. The Appellant’s wife is identified by the Respondent as a member of the particular social group ‘Iraqi women’ , and the Appellant and his children are members of her family.

Primary Claimant
23. One last issue in the appeal should not go unremarked. That is the fact that the claim rests primarily on the persecution suffered, and feared, not by the Appellant, but by his wife. Judge Ficklin makes reference to this anomaly at his paragraph 11, and the grounds take issue with his commentary that it is “unfortunate” that she was not interviewed. Ms McVeety reads that to be a criticism of the Respondent, which he submits to be unfair. She was not interviewed because she did not claim asylum; it was not in the Respondent’s gift to interview her. I am not sure that Judge Ficklin was aiming his complaint at the Respondent. If he was, then I entirely agree that this would be inappropriate. Her decision not to claim is not however a matter for me, or Judge Ficklin, or the Respondent. It is entirely a matter for her and her representatives. I am not however satisfied that anything turns on it, since the comment Judge Ficklin makes at his paragraph 11 is plainly obiter, whoever it is aimed at.

Decisions
24. The decision of the First-tier Tribunal is upheld and the Secretary of State’s appeal is dismissed.
25. There is an anonymity order in this case.

Upper Tribunal Judge Bruce
Immigration and Asylum Chamber
1st February 2025