Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-000061
PA/58634/2023
LP/06252/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

14th July 2025

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE BRUCE

Between

ZR (IRAN)
(anonymity order made)
Appellant
and

Secretary of State for Home Department
Respondent

Representation:

For the Appellant: Ms Faryl, Counsel instructed by Barnes Harrild and Dyer
For the Respondent: Mr Thompson, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Phoenix House (Bradford) on 30 April 2025

ANONYMITY

Pursuant to rule 14 of the Tribunal Procedure (Upper Tribunal) Rules 2008, the Appellant is granted anonymity.

No-one shall publish or reveal any information, including the name or address of the Appellant likely to lead members of the public to identify the Appellant. Failure to comply with this order could amount to a contempt of court.

DECISION AND REASONS
1. The Appellant is a national of Iran born in 2001. He appeals with permission against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal to dismiss his appeal on protection grounds.
2. The substance of the Appellant’s case that he is a Kurd who was formerly engaged as a kolbar, a smuggler, bringing illegal goods into Iran from across the Iraqi border. He avers that in late 2020 he met a man from the banned Kurdish separatist group PJAK who offered to pay him if he brought propaganda materials into Iran. The Appellant agreed and was paid 400,000 toumans for a trip. In September 2021 he agreed to a second run. This time he and other smugglers were intercepted by the authorities who shot at them and chased them. Seven smugglers, including the Appellant, managed to escape. Two of their number were however captured, one being the PJAK operative who had originally recruited the Appellant, a man identified in the papers as KA. The Appellant, fearing arrest, did not go home. He instead went to his uncle’s home where he was able to call his mother. She told him that the security forces had come to the house, arrested his younger brother and seized some documents. The Appellant fled Iran. This narrative forms the basis of one plank of his claim for protection: he states that he has a well-founded fear of persecution in Iran for reasons of his (imputed) political opinion.
3. A second plank rests on the Appellant’s activities since he arrived in this country. The Appellant has taken the opportunity, whilst living in the UK, to attend numerous demonstrations against the Iranian government, and has built a social media network of 4330 Facebook ‘friends’, on an open account, with whom he shares content critical of Iran and in favour of Kurdish rights. This too, he submits, places him at risk.
4. The First-tier Tribunal rejected the entire claim for a want of credibility. Although it accepted, on the basis of country background material, that pro-Kurdish materials are smuggled across this border, that kolbars are frequently arrested, and that the authorities operate a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy, it found the Appellant’s account did not discharge the burden of proof. The Appellant now has permission to appeal against the decision on two central grounds. I deal with each in turn.

Ground 1: Errors in Approach to Credibility
5. At its paragraph 27 the First-tier Tribunal decision notes that the Appellant “could not explain” why PJAK waited 9 months before asking him to do a second run. The decision then says this at 28:
“I do not accept the Appellant was as interested in PKAK politics as he now suggests given he did not read the documents and it was around none months between the two requests. Given he claimed he was originally asked to transport leaflets because he engaged in conversation with KA I find this lack of activity in transporting leaflets undermined both his claim to be interested in PJAK and his claim to be transporting leaflets as he said none of the other people he knew were asked to carry leaflets" (sic)
6. This paragraph forms the centrepiece of the Tribunal’s assessment of the Appellant’s historical claim. Ms Faryl submits that it is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it contains an error of fact in that it was actually only six months between the runs. This demonstrates a lack of anxious scrutiny. Second, in dismissing the Appellant’s claims to have been interested in PJAK and supporting their work, the Tribunal nowhere factors in the Appellant’s evidence, set out in both interview and witness statement, about how he became interested in Kurdish rights through conversations with AK, and why he wanted to do this work. Thirdly, there is no rational basis for rejecting the entire account because there was a gap between the two runs.
7. I bear in mind that judges of this chamber are being encouraged to write short decisions and I appreciate that this is not an easy task to balance against the requirement of ‘anxious scrutiny’. I have, as Mr Thompson urged me to do, read paragraph 28 in the context of the decision as a whole. Having done so I find myself in agreement with Mr Faryl that the reasoning therein is insufficiently clear, and flawed for a failure to weigh in the balance what the Appellant himself has said about why he undertook that work. As I read it, the central finding is that the gap between the two runs is somehow inconsistent with the Appellant’s claim to have, at least in part, been motivated by sympathy for the cause. If that is what the Tribunal intended, it seems to me that this reasoning fails to have regard to the findings made elsewhere about the inherent dangers in this kind of operation. Looking at the Appellant’s evidence in the context of the country background material, I can find nothing inherently problematic in his claim that some months went by before he was asked – and was prepared – to risk this dangerous undertaking again.

Ground 2: Failure to Consider Evidence in the Round
8. The decision below accepts that the Appellant has attended numerous demonstrations, and that he has engaged in what must be many hours of internet activity. It discounts the possibility that any of this is motivated by genuine antagonism to the Iranian government in this sentence: “as it is not accepted he is a genuine supporter the principles of HJ (Iran) and HT (Cameroon) [2010] UKSC 31 would not apply”. The decision therefore goes from rejecting the account of events in Iran (for reasons unclear – see above) to rejecting his claim to today hold oppositionist political views.
9. Ms Faryl contends, and I accept, that the Tribunal has nowhere stood back and looked at the case from a different perspective: if the Appellant’s efforts in the UK are being made because he is genuinely invested in the downfall of the Iranian regime, then it begins to make more sense that he would have taken the risks he claims whilst working as a kolbar. The failure to consider that possibility, and to evaluate all of the evidence in the round, is an error of law.

Decision and Directions
10. The decision is set aside for error of law.
11. The parties invite me, in these circumstances, to remit the matter to the First-tier Tribunal to be remade de novo.
12. There is currently an order for anonymity in this ongoing protection appeal.

Upper Tribunal Judge Bruce
Immigration and Asylum Chamber
3rd July 2025