Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-000846

First-tier Tribunal No: PA/58261/2023
IA/00835/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:
On 29 November 2025

Before

DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE ANZANI

Between

ZM
(ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Appellant
and

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr A. Devlin, Advocate instructed by McGlashan MacKay Solicitors
For the Respondent: Ms C. Newton, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 11 November 2025

Order Regarding 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
Introduction
1. The Appellant appeals against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal dated 11 December 2024, which dismissed his appeal against the Respondent’s decision of 11 October 2023 refusing his protection and human rights claim.
Background
2. The Appellant is a national of Iraq. He states that a long-standing feud existed within his paternal family, arising from a dispute over inheritance. As a result of this conflict, his family had ceased contact with the branch of the family belonging to his father’s brother. Despite this estrangement, while attending the same school, the Appellant formed a romantic relationship with his paternal cousin, SM. They began a relationship in 2019, keeping it secret from most members of both families. The couple engaged in sexual relations, and SM’s mother subsequently discovered the relationship. The Appellant asserts that, given the prevalence of honour-based violence in Iraq, both he and SM believed they had no choice but to flee the country. During their journey to the United Kingdom, the Appellant became separated from SM and has been unable to locate her since.
3. The Appellant fears both his own family and SM’s family. He believes that, due to having engaged in premarital sexual relations with his cousin and in light of the existing feud between the families, he would be at risk of an honour killing if returned to Iraq.
4. The Appellant further contends that, since arriving in the United Kingdom, he has posted images on Facebook which may be perceived as critical of the Iraqi and Kurdish authorities.
5. In refusing the claim, the Respondent accepted the Appellant’s identity, date of birth, and nationality. It was also accepted that the Appellant is of Kurdish ethnicity and that he departed Iraq illegally. The Respondent, however, rejected all other aspects of the Appellant’s account.
Decision of the First-tier Tribunal
6. The appeal was heard by the First-tier Tribunal Judge (“the Judge”) sitting in Glasgow on 4 October 2024. The Appellant attended the hearing and gave evidence. He was represented by a solicitor, Mr Baig. A summary of the Appellant’s evidence, drawn from his interviews, witness statement, and oral evidence at the hearing, appears at [13] to [47] of the Judge’s decision.
7. At paragraph 48 of the determination, the Judge records that the Appellant pursued his appeal on the basis of a claim for humanitarian protection, asserting that he would face serious harm upon return to Iraq. He did not seek recognition as a refugee in the United Kingdom. This position is not challenged by Mr Devlin.
8. The First-tier Tribunal Judge dismissed the appeal, finding that the Appellant had not established, even to the lower standard of proof, that his account was reasonably likely to be true. The Judge found that the Appellant’s evidence lacked necessary detail on key aspects of the claim and was marked by material inconsistencies which undermined its overall credibility. In relation to the alleged family feud, the Judge held that the Appellant had provided insufficient and unreliable information regarding its cause, history, or any past acts of reprisal. The Judge also found the Appellant’s evidence about his uncle’s influence to be vague, noting that he was unable to identify any individuals his uncle might call upon to harm him and that there was no supporting country evidence indicating that such influence would extend beyond the local area. Further inconsistencies were identified in the Appellant’s account of marriage proposals, which changed over time, and in his description of how he and SM conducted their relationship. The Judge additionally noted that the Appellant’s claim that SM had been beaten prior to disclosing the relationship was not consistently presented across his evidence.
9. The Judge also identified discrepancies arising from the Appellant’s conduct in the United Kingdom. The Appellant’s account of political activity conflicted with submissions made on his behalf, and material obtained directly from Facebook was inconsistent with his own description of his online conduct. The Judge found the Appellant’s explanation regarding documentation and family contact to be unconvincing. Although the Appellant asserted that he had no means of contacting his family in Iraq, he provided no detail of any attempts to reach them, despite claiming only a personal risk that did not extend to his relatives. The Judge considered that, in these circumstances, the Appellant had not established that he could not reasonably obtain necessary documentation from family members who appeared to continue living their lives in Iraq. Taking the evidence cumulatively, the Judge concluded that the Appellant had not demonstrated substantial grounds for believing that he faced a real risk of serious harm on return, and therefore dismissed his claim for humanitarian protection.
Grounds of appeal
10. The Appellant sought permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal on five grounds, which can be summarised as follows:
(i) The Judge wrongly assumed the Appellant’s family dispute was a “blood feud” requiring detailed knowledge of events and reprisals. The Appellant only described a simple inheritance dispute causing estrangement, not retaliatory violence. Expecting detailed knowledge was therefore unreasonable, and the adverse credibility finding was irrational.
(ii) The Judge erred in law by treating the lack of detailed evidence about the uncle’s sphere of influence as relevant when, given the accepted lack of effective protection against honour crimes in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (“IKR”), that issue was immaterial to the risk assessment.
(iii) The Judge mistakenly found that the Appellant claimed a formal marriage proposal was made and refused. The interview record shows the Appellant only sought permission to visit SM’s family to make such a proposal, but permission was refused. This mistake was not caused by the Appellant and materially impacted the credibility assessment.
(iv) The Judge erred in law by drawing an adverse inference from the Appellant’s failure to repeat, in his witness statement, an account he had already given at interview about SM’s mother beating her.
(v) The Judge erred in law by drawing an adverse inference from the inconsistency between the Appellant’s evidence and the Appeal Skeleton Argument (ASA) without considering relevant matters, such as whether the discrepancy was the result of mistake or whether the Appellant had any motive to change his account.
11. Permission to appeal was initially refused by the First-tier Tribunal on 5 February 2025. However, following a renewed application, Upper Tribunal Judge Landes granted permission on all grounds on 18 June 2025.

Decision and reasons
12. I have considered the First-tier Tribunal decision, the documentation that was before the First-tier Tribunal, the grounds of appeal, and the submissions made at the hearing, before coming to a decision in this appeal. It is not necessary to summarise the oral submissions because they are a matter of record, but I will refer to any relevant arguments in my decision.
13. The Supreme Court in HA (Iraq) v SSHD [2022] UKSC 22 reiterated that judicial caution and restraint is required when considering whether to set aside a decision of a specialist tribunal. In particular, judges of the specialist tribunal are best placed to make factual findings. Appellate courts should not rush to find misdirections simply because they might have reached a different conclusion on the facts or expressed themselves differently: see AH (Sudan) v SSHD [2007] UKHL 49 and KM v SSHD [2021] EWCA Civ 693. Where a relevant point is not expressly mentioned by the tribunal, the court should be slow to infer that it has not been taken into account: see MA (Somalia) v SSHD [2020] UKSC 49. When it comes to the reasons given by the tribunal, the court should exercise judicial restraint and should not assume that the tribunal misdirected itself just because not every step in its reasoning is fully set out: see R (Jones) v FTT (SEC) [2013] UKSC 19. I have kept these considerations in mind when coming to my decision.
14. It is clear from the First-tier Tribunal decision that the Judge had all the documents filed by both parties before him [4]-[7]. He outlined the relevant legal framework. The Judge then summarised the case put by the appellant in some detail [13]-[47]. He also considered the ASA and submissions made on behalf of the appellant at the hearing [5]-[7]. There is nothing to suggest that the Judge did not consider all of the evidence before him when coming to his decision.
15. The Appellant’s first ground of challenge is that the Judge erred in law, specifically at paragraph 50 of his decision, by making findings that no reasonable tribunal could have reached. At paragraph 50, the Judge stated:
“The evidence concerning a family feud is not detailed. There is insufficient reliable evidence about important features of a feud. It lacks detail about the cause of the feud; about the history of the feud; about any specific acts of reprisal which might previously have been part of the feud”.
16. The essence of Ground 1 is that the Judge wrongly approached the Appellant’s account on the basis that he was alleging a blood feud, which would ordinarily involve retaliatory violence and ongoing cycles of reprisal. The Appellant maintains that he never described anything of that kind. Rather, he referred only to a straightforward inheritance dispute that had led to tension and estrangement between family members. On that basis, the Appellant argues that the Judge’s expectation of detailed knowledge of acts of retaliation was misplaced and unreasonable. It is submitted that this led the Judge to make an irrational adverse credibility finding.
17. The difficulty with that submission, however, is that the Appellant’s own representatives repeatedly characterised the dispute as a blood feud in the Appellant’s ASA. Under the heading Case Summary, the ASA states:
“Within the Appellant’s paternal family, there was a blood feud which began after a dispute over inheritance”.
It continues:
“He fears that due to having sex before marriage with his cousin, and due to the blood feud between the two sides of the family he will become the victim of honour killing should he be returned to Iraq”.
18. Further, under the heading Submissions, the ASA again asserts:
“The families of the Appellant and his girlfriend were already engaged in a blood feud. If the Appellant was to be returned to Iraq, it is reasonable to assume that he would become a victim of an honour crime and could potentially be killed”.
19. Mr Devlin candidly accepted that the ASA consistently refers to a blood feud. He argued, however, that the Appellant himself never claimed to be involved in such a feud when questioned in either interview or oral evidence. His position was that the Appellant described only a family dispute, not a retaliatory feud, and therefore it was unreasonable for the Judge to criticise him for lacking knowledge of matters he had never asserted. On that basis, Mr Devlin submitted that the Judge’s conclusion, that the Appellant’s account was deficient because he could not describe the features of a blood feud, was a finding that no reasonable judge could have reached.
20. I disagree. Given that the ASA, prepared by the Appellant’s own representatives, repeatedly characterised the dispute as a blood feud, it was plainly open to the Judge to assess the Appellant’s evidence on that basis. The Judge was entitled to expect that an appellant advancing a claim framed in terms of a blood feud would be able to provide at least some coherent detail about its origins, its development, and any retaliatory incidents said to form part of it. The Judge’s observation that such detail was lacking was therefore neither perverse nor irrational. This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that the characterisation of the dispute as a blood feud in the ASA was not withdrawn, corrected, or clarified prior to or during the hearing. In those circumstances, the Judge was entitled to proceed on the basis of the case as it had been formally advanced, and his assessment of the adequacy of the Appellant’s evidence was entirely within the bounds of reasonable judicial evaluation.
21. For these reasons, I find that the first ground fails to disclose any error of law capable of making a material difference to the outcome of the appeal.
22. Ground 2 contends that the Judge erred at paragraph 51 of his decision in finding that the evidence regarding the Appellant’s uncle’s sphere of influence was insufficiently detailed, and unsupported by evidence. The ground argues that the uncle’s influence would only become relevant if it had first been established that there was systemic sufficiency of protection for victims of honour crimes in the IKR, which was not the case. Therefore the Judge’s criticism of the evidence was misplaced.
23. Mr Devlin did not seek to develop this ground orally, accepting that it was open to the Judge to consider matters that might be regarded as peripheral to the core claim. That acceptance was well founded. The Judge was entitled to assess the internal coherence and plausibility of the Appellant’s account, including whether there was adequate evidential support for the alleged influence and reach of the uncle said to pose a risk. The scope of the uncle’s influence was a relevant component of the Appellant’s narrative concerning future risk, regardless of whether wider issues of state protection arose. Assessing whether the Appellant’s account was supported by concrete or reliable detail fell squarely within the Judge’s fact-finding remit. The Judge’s observation that the evidence lacked sufficient detail was therefore a permissible finding and does not amount to a material error of law.
24. In Ground 3, the Appellant contends that the Judge erred in law, at paragraphs [33] to [35] and [52] of his decision, by making a material mistake of fact for which neither the Appellant nor his representatives were responsible. The alleged error arises from the Judge’s finding at paragraph 33 that:
“…when the appellant undertook his interview in September 2023, his evidence was that marriage proposals made on his behalf had met with rejection.”
25. The Appellant submits that he never stated in his asylum interview that any formal marriage proposal had been made on his behalf. At Q74, when asked, “Why did you not ask for her hand or send your proposal instead of leaving in this way?”, he responded, “Before we became intimate a few times I send messages via my aunt to allow us to go there for marriage proposal but they refused.” This, Mr Devlin submits, indicates that the Appellant sought permission, through his aunt, to attend on SM’s parents in order to make a proposal, but that permission to attend was refused. It does not amount to evidence that a proposal had already been formally put forward.
26. The Judge also stated that “at Q75 the appellant talks about ‘they refused’ proposals,” which he understood to mean that concrete proposals had been made to SM’s family. However, at Q75, the Appellant stated, “My father did not know. My mother and my aunt knew, when they refused my mother said you should stop…” Mr Devlin submits that while the answer to Q75 is ambiguous, when read together with his answer to Q74, it is reasonably understood as referring to SM’s family refusing permission to engage in discussions about marriage, not the rejection of an already-tendered proposal.
27. On that basis, Ground 3 asserts that the Judge made two mistakes of fact: (i) that the Appellant had said proposals were made on his behalf and rejected, and (ii) that he referred to “refused proposals” at Q75. Mr Devlin submitted that the Judge therefore misinterpreted the interview record, and that this misunderstanding materially undermined the Judge’s later finding that the Appellant’s account was inconsistent and unreliable.
28. I queried with Mr Devlin the content of paragraph 24 of the Appellant’s own witness statement, where he stated:
“In response to my mother asking [SM’s] family for her hand in marriage, to confirm, I never mentioned that my mother asked for [SM’s] hand in marriage, I only mentioned my aunt. It was my Paternal Aunt who had a good relationship with my Father and Uncle. She went to my Uncle’s house to ask for [SM’s] hand in marriage. I confided in my Aunt regarding my relationship with [SM], because I loved her so much, I was ready to give up anything in my life in order to make our relationship work.”
29. This passage appears to describe not a request for permission to attend in order to make a proposal, but a direct approach to SM’s family seeking her hand in marriage. That is, on its face, a description of a marriage proposal, and not merely a request for permission to make one.
30. Mr Devlin argued that paragraph 24 must be interpreted through the lens of Q74 and Q75, and that if the Judge had properly understood the interview answers, he would have recognised consistency across the evidence.
31. I do not agree. When the interview answers at Q74–75 are read alongside paragraph 24 of the Appellant’s own witness statement, there is no arguable misinterpretation on the part of the Judge. This is because the Appellant’s own witness statement at paragraph 24 expressly asserts that his aunt went to SM’s family to ask for her hand in marriage. That evidence goes beyond merely seeking permission to attend the family home, it clearly describes an actual proposal being made. The Judge was entitled to read the witness statement in its ordinary meaning and to take it as the Appellant’s account. Accordingly, the Judge’s understanding, that the Appellant’s case involved a rejected marriage proposal, was entirely open to him based on the Appellant’s own written evidence, and no mistake of fact arises. Even if the interview answers could be viewed as ambiguous in isolation, the witness statement removes any ambiguity. Accordingly, Ground 3 does not disclose a material error of law.
32. In Ground 4, the Appellant contends that the Judge erred in law at [41] and [55] of his decision by drawing an adverse inference from the Appellant’s omission, in [8] of his witness statement, to mention that SM’s mother had “beaten” her. It is argued that no reasonable Judge, applying anxious scrutiny, would have treated this omission as damaging to credibility because the Appellant had referred to the matter earlier at Q57 of his asylum interview, and, in any event, caution was required given that the Appellant gave evidence through an interpreter, that linguistic nuances may be lost in translation, that the English word “beat” can carry a range of meanings, and that it should not automatically be assumed that the Appellant intended to describe a serious assault such that failure to repeat the allegation at a later stage legitimately undermined his credibility.
33. On that basis, it is submitted that the Judge made a finding which no reasonable decision-maker could have reached, amounting to an error of law.
34. I do not agree. The Judge’s reasoning was not irrational. The allegation that SM’s mother “beat” her was introduced by the Appellant himself during interview as part of his explanation of SM’s family dynamics and their attitudes towards the relationship. Read in context, the term clearly conveyed an allegation of physical violence, not a minor or metaphorical reprimand. If the Appellant intended the term in some weaker or non-literal sense, it was open to him, and indeed expected of him, to clarify or elaborate upon this in his witness statement, especially because allegations of familial violence were central to the claimed risk on return. The statement was prepared with legal assistance and designed to present a clear and accurate account. The omission of a specific allegation of physical mistreatment was therefore reasonably treated by the Judge as significant. Moreover, the Judge did not view this omission in isolation but considered it as part of a broader pattern of inconsistencies across the Appellant’s evidence. The Appellant’s credibility lay at the heart of the issues the Judge was required to determine. Assessing whether the Appellant had given a clear, consistent, and complete account was a necessary part of that task, and the Judge was entitled to regard this omission as relevant to credibility. The conclusion reached was accordingly one that was properly open to the Judge and does not disclose an error of law.
35. Finally, in Ground 5, the Appellant contends that the Judge erred in law, at [55] of his decision, by failing to take into account all relevant considerations. At [55], the Judge stated:
“In relation to events since the appellant arrived in the UK: the appellant’s evidence is markedly different from the argument advanced for him in his ASA. The appellant says clearly that he has not attended demonstrations.”
36. The Appellant argues that this indicates the Judge rejected his explanation that the reference in the ASA to his attendance at demonstrations was a mistake, and instead drew an adverse inference solely from the inconsistency between the ASA and his witness statement. It is submitted that the Judge ought to have considered whether the Appellant had any motive to change his position, or whether there was a satisfactory explanation for the inconsistency, such as an error by his representatives. These matters, it is said, were plainly relevant when assessing credibility. The Appellant further submits that, had the Judge approached the matter in this way, he might have decided not to draw any adverse inference from the inconsistency, and that this suffices to establish materiality.
37. I do not agree. The Judge did not ignore the Appellant’s explanation. On the contrary, he expressly recorded the Appellant’s position that the relevant passage in the ASA was a mistake, and then contrasted that with the Appellant’s own clear oral evidence that he had not attended demonstrations. The Judge was therefore plainly aware of, and took into account, the Appellant’s assertion that the ASA was erroneous. What the Judge did, permissibly I find, was to evaluate whether that explanation was credible in the context of the evidence as a whole. He was not required to accept the explanation simply because it was advanced, particularly where the inconsistency concerned a straightforward factual matter on which the Appellant could reasonably be expected to give a consistent account. The discrepancy was one of several inconsistencies the Judge identified, and his assessment of it fell squarely within his fact-finding discretion. There is nothing to suggest that the Judge proceeded on the basis that the Appellant had been dishonest. Rather, he treated the inconsistency as relevant to overall credibility, which he was entitled to do. Accordingly, Ground 5 does not disclose any failure to consider a material matter, nor any error of law.
38. For the reasons given above, I conclude that the First-tier Tribunal decision did not involve the making of an error on a point of law.
39. The decision shall stand.
Notice of Decision
The First-tier Tribunal decision did not involve the making of an error on a point of law.
The decision shall stand.

S. Anzani
Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

25 November 2025