Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-001630 & UI-2025-001631

First-tier Tribunal No: PA/55847/2023
PA/54864/2024
LP/07218/2024
LP/07219/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 21st of November 2025

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE PINDER
DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE SYMES

Between

AA AND YA (EGYPT)
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr M West
For the Respondent: Mr P Deller

Heard at Field House on 9 September 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 appellants, 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 Appellants (the father, AA, born 6 November 1990, and his son, YA, born 11 April 2019) appeal against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal of 30 January 2025 dismissing their appeals on asylum grounds, themselves brought against the Respondent’s decisions of 15 August 2023 to refuse their asylum claims. Anonymity was ordered below and we continue to make such an order ourselves given that the appeals involve international protection. As AA was the principal claimant upon whom his son’s case depends, we will henceforth refer to the Appellant in the singular.
Background
2. The Appellant's asylum claim (made on 15 March 2021) essentially arises from these facts. He performed national service in the army in Egypt from October 2010 until December 2012. He subsequently went to work in Qatar, from where he received a summons to resume his military service for a short period, in July 2019.
3. He returned to Egypt to fulfil that duty and was then stationed in a post protecting the border between Egypt and Libya. In July 2019 he was involved in an incident leading to the death of two (and injury of four other) smugglers whereby his unit fired on the area they were passing through during an exchange of gunfire, triggering the explosion of landmines. The smugglers who survived this explosion subsequently threatened and attacked his family in December 2019. They also reported him to the authorities for having worked with them. He obtained a visit visa to come to the UK, arriving here in January 2020.
4. The authorities prosecuted him resulting in a court order of 20 December 2020 to a lengthy term of imprisonment and to pay a fine. He feared being killed by the smugglers or their agents, whether he was at liberty or in prison in Egypt; or being punished by the government. He attributed the delay in making an asylum claim to his hopes that the authorities’ investigation into the case might clear his name. The court proceedings in Egypt were delayed due to the pandemic but once he was sentenced in his absence he realised he could no longer safely return there.
The Appeal to the First-tier Tribunal
5. The Appellant provided supporting evidence including police reports of 23 September 2020 and 6 December 2021 recording his wife’s accounts of attacks on the family home by persons unknown who had damaged the property; on the latter occasion they threatened to kill her and her son if the Appellant did not return home. Another report of 15 March 2020 recounted an incident when she and her son were deliberately driven at by motorcyclists, who then left a written death threat to her if she did not ensure her husband’s return. Reports of 12 December 2019 and 13 April 2021 recorded his father being the subject of a similar attack and threats; another report of 1 June 2022 referred to an attack on his brother. There was also a certificate from the Alexandria Criminal Court archives referring to the Appellant being sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment and receiving a fine of £50,000 in December 2020.
6. The First-tier Tribunal did not accept the Appellant as a credible witness, because aspects of his account were considered implausible: in particular, the proposition that soldiers could reasonably be thought capable of triggering mine explosions from gunshots given the unlikelihood of hitting the detonator cap (prefaced by the comment “I am not a military expert but I do have some military knowledge”) and that the Appellant had not instructed a lawyer to defend himself against the proceedings in Egypt. He had provided no evidence of being visited by the smugglers in Egypt and it was speculative for him to suggest that they could have located his address. Further, his wife had not given evidence to confirm the threats that she had received, he had not obtained confirmation of the alleged charge against him from an Egyptian lawyer, and had retained no evidence of the threatening letters he claimed to have received himself. His asylum application was made late notwithstanding the public availability of information as to how to make a claim. It was for the Appellant to establish the genuineness of his documents as per Tanveer Ahmed and he had failed to do so: “Because of the Appellant's general lack of credibility, I could not accept the document that he produced at face value and I had to look at his behaviour in the round.”
The Appeal to the Upper Tribunal
7. The Appellant lodged grounds of appeal alleging the First-tier Tribunal had erred in law which can be summarised thus, by:
(a) Effectively relying on post-decision research by applying its own mind to the likelihood of mines being set off by gunfire, without canvassing the matter at the hearing.
(b) Failing to record, or have regard to, the Appellant's oral evidence at the hearing that he believed that the addresses of soldiers would be readily available via collaborators within the military and that as he was an officer it would be easy to access the information.
(c) Misapplying Tanveer Ahmed, which emphasised the importance of an Appellant demonstrating the reliability of their documents rather than their genuineness, and putting the cart before the horse by discounting the documents based on the Judge’s perception of the Appellant's general credibility rather than evaluating all the evidence holistically.
8. The First-tier Tribunal refused permission to appeal in March 2025. Upper Tribunal Judge Reed granted permission to appeal on 7 May 2025, on the basis that it was arguable that the First-tier Tribunal had not properly addressed the documentary evidence, that it appeared relevant evidence had been overlooked, and that the reference to “some military knowledge” failed to establish what material truly underlaid the Judge’s thinking.
9. The Respondent’s Rule 24 response of 3 September 2025 accepted that the third ground of appeal (that raising the proper application of the Tanveer Ahmed principle) was established. There had been no analysis of the contents of the documentary evidence supplied and they appeared to have been discounted mainly due to the absence of confirmation of their reliability by an Egyptian lawyer. The other two grounds were resisted, on the basis that it required no real military insight to conclude that a soldier’s chances of successfully hitting a buried mine’s detonator cap was remote; and the record of evidence proffered with the grounds of appeal did not really advance matters vis-á-vis the Judge’s reasoning attacked by the second ground.
10. At the hearing before us Mr Deller briefly expanded on the Rule 24 response, confirming that the Respondent’s view was the error in approach regarding the documents was so significant that a re-hearing would be necessary, a position from which Mr West did not desist.

Analysis
11. Having deliberated on the matter for ourselves we agreed with the parties that the Judge below materially erred in law. There were a range of documents from Egypt by way of police reports and the record from the Alexandria court archive that required individualised assessment. They were not to be evaluated separately from the Appellant’s account of historical facts generally. As it was put by Lord Malcolm in AR [2017] ScotCS CSIH_52 at [34]: “One cannot simply rely on doubts as to the veracity of the account given by the claimant as a reason for rejecting the documents when, on their face, they support his asylum claim.”
12. Given that our conclusion requires the First-tier Tribunal’s decision be revisited, it is not strictly necessary to address the other grounds. However we note that the Appellant’s oral evidence as recorded in his advocate’s record of proceedings (the content of which was not challenged by the Respondent) did contain a potential explanation as to how his antagonists might have learned of his home address, namely his belief that some addresses may have been leaked by a military source. The Appellant’s witness statement is rather vague but nevertheless all the evidence must be evaluated at the re-hearing. We might add that whilst we ourselves proclaim no military expertise whatsoever, we are surprised at the confidence with which the Judge below ruled out the possibility of an unlikely event. Unlikely events, even highly improbable ones, may occur. One might question whether an onlooker could confidently attribute an explosion in a minefield to be due to gunshots rather than the self-evident possibility that those seeking to evade the gunshots inadvertently trod on a mine. Nevertheless, these are matters which the next fact-finding Judge will have to determine for themselves.
13. Given the scale of the fact-finding to finally determine the appeal, it is necessary to remit the matter to the First-tier Tribunal with no retained findings. An Arabic Middle Eastern interpreter will be required.
Notice of Decision
The decision of the First-tier Tribunal involved the making of an error of law and that decision is set aside, with the matter to be re-heard afresh by the First-tier Tribunal.
It was believed this decision had been sent for promulgation in October 2025 but in the event this was not effective, it is now being promulgated in any event on the date below.

Mark Symes

Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

18 November 2025