Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-001678

First-tier Tribunal No: PA/61916/2023
LP/11653/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 11th of November 2025

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE NEVILLE
DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE JOLLIFFE

Between

HK
(ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr F Ahmed, counsel instructed by Hanson Law Ltd
For the Respondent: Mr K Ojo, Senior Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 14 July 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

1. The appellant is a 20 year old Iranian national who entered the United Kingdom on 24 August 2022 and claimed asylum. He claims to fear persecution on return to Iran, arising from a sexual relationship with his sister-in-law, which exposes him to both violence from his family and brother and state prosecution for zina (fornication).
2. The asylum claim was refused on 10 November 2023 (“the refusal decision”). The respondent accepted the appellant’s identity, age, Iranian nationality and Kurdish ethnicity, but rejected the appellant’s account of the events leading to his departure. Various examples were given in the refusal decision of where the account was said to be inconsistent, both internally and with country evidence concerning Iran, and where the appellant had been unable to provide a reasonable level of detail in response to questions at interview. The claim for Humanitarian Protection and in relation to Articles 2 and 3 ECHR was therefore rejected on credibility grounds; it did not engage the Refugee Convention in any event. The respondent did accept that if the appellant’s account were true, he could not avoid risk on return by internal relocation or by accessing state protection. As the appellant had only lived in the UK for a short time and had no family life here, the claim was further refused in relation to Article 8 ECHR.
3. An appeal against the refusal decision to the First-tier Tribunal was heard on 10 February 2025 and dismissed in a reserved decision on 13 February 2025. The Judge’s reasons for rejecting the credibility of the appellant’s account can be briefly summarised as follows:
a. The appellant’s claim that his brother worked for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (“IRGC”) was inconsistent with him having only been educated to a low level at the local Madrassa, and the appellant had inconsistently referred to him as a ‘Pasdar’ elsewhere.
b. The appellant had never offered up a reasonable explanation as to why his sister-in-law would want to instigate a sexual relationship with him when moving into the house given the risks involved to her if caught.
c. It was manifestly implausible that the pair could have maintained an affair for 8-9 months under the family roof without detection. The sexual relationship was also inconsistent with the appellant’s claim to be a child (he had originally been thought by the respondent to be older, but his claimed age was later assessed as accurate by social workers).
d. In describing how he had been caught in flagrante, the appellant had variously described his brother as wielding a rifle and a pistol, which was inconsistent. The way in which he escaped was also implausible.
e. The appellant’s uncle helping him to escape Iran was inconsistent with how angry the appellant said he had been, and the risk he would be taking.
4. The appellant has permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal on four grounds (for ease of reference, they are slightly reformulated in the following description). First, the Judge provided no basis for his view that IRGC membership was restricted to those who are highly educated and/or have family connections, nor could one be found in any of the country evidence before him. Second, the Judge was wrong to treat being in the IRGC and being a Pasdar as inconsistent, the latter being an informal term for the former. Third, the Judge is criticised for placing impermissible weight on how he assumed others would act in a particular situation, and neglecting to approach the appellant’s recollection according to his age at the time. Fourth, the Judge had failed to consider whether the appellant would be at risk on return to Iran even if his account was correctly rejected.
5. As the challenge is to findings of fact, the Upper Tribunal will only interfere where satisfied that the First-tier Tribunal’s conclusion was plainly wrong. As summarised by Carr LJ (as she then was) in Clin v Walter Lilly & Co Ltd [2021] EWCA Civ 136 at [85]–[86], this includes where the trial judge fundamentally misunderstood the issue or the evidence, failed to take relevant evidence into account, or reached a conclusion that the evidence could not support. It may also arise where the finding is infected by a material error of law or lies outside the bounds of reasonable disagreement. The appellate tribunal does not carry out a balancing task, but instead must identify a discrete flaw in the reasoning, such as a gap in logic, inconsistency, or failure to consider a material factor, that undermines the cogency of the conclusion.
Brother’s role
6. We take the first two points together. While the Judge did not have to set out each and every piece of evidence upon which he relied in reaching his conclusions, or set out every step in his reasoning, it is clear that significant adverse weight was placed on the perceived flaws in the appellant’s account of his brother’s role on the border. The analysis was as follows:
25. I conclude that the Appellant’s claims are inherently implausible. The detail provided regarding the profile of the Appellant’s brother is not credible. The Appellant claimed at interview that his brother was in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). In his earlier sources of evidence he stated that he and both his brothers had only been educated in the Mosque. With that level and background of education, the Appellant’s brother would be very unlikely to have obtained a position in the IRGC. This is unlikely, particularly so as no one in the Appellant’s family had been involved in politics or had any government job. In the Appellant’s witness statement for the appeal he offers up additional detail and is materially inconsistent internally with that earlier source of evidence. He states that his elder brother, whom he says was married to the sister in law with whom he had sexual relations with, had in fact been educated at school compared with him and his younger brother. He shifts away from the suggestion that his brother was in the IRGC, referring to him as a Pazdar. I find that these explanations / inconsistencies has only been offered up as an afterthought in response to the Respondent’s criticisms. There is no credible basis for the Appellant having offered up this inconsistent evidence. I further noted that he adopted his earlier witness statement referring to he and his brothers all being educated at the Mosque without amendment. His inconsistency on such matters undermines his credibility.
7. The sustainability of that analysis must logically depend on IRGC membership and working as a Pasdar being two different things. The grounds are correct in their complaint that Pasdar is actually an informal word for someone working for the IRGC. They cite the Encyclopaedia Britannica article for the IRGC, which relevantly reads:
The IRGC was a product of the Iranian Revolution in 1978-79. In April 1979 Khomeini, the guiding figure of the revolution, established the IRGC by decree to unify and organize paramilitary forces that had arisen during the turmoil and were committed to the revolution. The unified force, often informally called Sepah or Pasdaran, would thus serve as a counterweight to the regular army (informally, Artesh), which had originally been loyal to the shah.
8. The same can be derived from a different source discussed at the hearing. The paragraph of the refusal decision that asserts an educational requirement for IRGC work cites an article from Gunpowder Magazine, Weapons of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, October 2019, which includes the following:
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a paramilitary branch of the Iranian armed forces, founded on May 5, 1979, after the Iranian Revolution two weeks earlier.
In the Farsi language, it’s known as the Sepâh-e Pâsdârân-e Enghelâb-e Eslâmi, or “Army of Guardians of the Islamic Revolution,” usually abbreviated to Pâsdârân (“Guardians”), and its stated intent is to “protect the Islamic republic’s political system,” essentially meaning to prevent coups, or internal and external threats to the regime. The IRGC has been officially designated as a terrorist organization since October 2018 by Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and since April 15, 2019 by the United States.
9. Against that background, we consider the sources of evidence to which the Judge referred. The asylum interview includes the following exchange:
46. Were any members of your family in the military?
yes
47. Who? and what part of the military were they in?
my older brother is a member of Revolutionary Guard
48. What do you know about the Revolutionary Guards?
only I know this unit is part of the Iranian force, defending and guarding the border
49. How do Revolutionary Guards generally treat Kurdish people?
if you have no problem then they wont touch you
50. What rank was your brother in the Revolutionary Guards?
just ordinary guard
51. What did his duties involve?
sometimes they deployed him to borderlands. Sometimes he was stationed in a base
10. And later:
127. Do you believe that your brother will be able to find you if you were to return to another part of Iran like Tehran or Tabriz?
If reported to the police, he is a member of the Revolutionary Guard, easily he can find me
128. You stated that your brother was an ordinary Guard, not in a senior position. What makes you think he has the influence to find you in another part of Iran?
no hes a Revolutionary Guard (Passdar) they are all the same, he will find me
11. Even on the material before the Judge, Revolutionary Guard and Pasdar (in its various Romanised spellings) were put forward as equivalent. In our experience of this jurisdiction, use of parentheses in interview notes often reflect that a particular word was used by the interviewee and its actual meaning noted down by the interviewer. Moreover, there can often be inconsistency between interpreters on whether an informal term is interpreted into its formal equivalent in English or the informal term retained.
12. The refusal decision did not make the mistake of thinking that Revolutionary Guard and Pasdar were different things, instead asserting that a Pasdar would not be a border guard. The evidence cited as substantiating that assertion simply does not do so – the referenced paragraphs in the CPIN Kurds and Kurdish political groups, Iran, May 2022, simply describe the IRGC doing other things, and do not exclude border enforcement. Indeed, we note that a different CPIN, Country policy and information note: smugglers, Iran, February 2022, makes extensive reference throughout to the IRGC work at the border. For example, at 5.1.4 it states:
5.1.4 An October 2020 report by the GIATOC on illicit economies in Iran noted, ‘While the Border Guard Command of the Islamic Republic’s Police Force (NAJA) technically controls the country’s borders, the IRGC’s heavy involvement in border control is open knowledge… As reported by Iranian news agencies, the IRGC and Iranian Border Guard continue to collaborate extensively in border-control operation.’
13. The latter CPIN could therefore be said to support the appellant’s account of his brother working as an ordinary police border guard and also working as a Pasdar – the two are an integrated force on the Iran/Iraq border. The appellant can be seen to attempt that explanation in his witness statement, post-dating the refusal decision:
5. The Home Office have stated that I have been inconsistent about my brother’s job, including what his rank was. My brother was a Pazdar, who are border guards who work for the Iranian army. He was an ordinary soldier; he was at the police station of Bana and the second one he was at the border at the checkpoints between Turkey and Iran, as well as the Iraq and Iran border. I do not know why he was working at two places, that was his role and his job. I do not know if he was a member or supporter of any political party in Iran, all I knew was that he was at the border as a Pazdar. I was 15 at the time, we didn’t have the opportunity to discuss the details of his work.
14. It can be seen that there is no inconsistency, simply a failure to take into account relevant material in a CPIN. By failing to refer that material to the Judge, the respondent was in breach of the duty described in UB (Sri Lanka) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] EWCA Civ 85. It is also unfortunate that the Judge does not record the appellant’s response to the supposed inconsistency between Revolutionary Guard and Pasdar, as procedural fairness would have required be canvassed in evidence: we would then be in a position to understand why this easily dispelled misapprehension persisted. This informed our decision to admit the Encyclopaedia Britannica article into evidence.
15. We also agree with the appellant that there is no apparent evidence to support the contention that a minimum level of education or family connection is required for IRGC membership. It would be surprising if there was such a requirement to be part of an IRGC integrated border force, which will require ‘ordinary guards’ alongside the type of specialist high level counter-insurgency specialists described in the CPIN. Mr Ojo took us to a different article footnoted in the refusal decision, but it does not assist.
16. The underlying evidential basis for the Judge’s conclusion on this evidence having been dismantled, even exercising the due appellate caution we hold it to be rationally unsupportable. The remaining inconsistency, being the level of schooling attained by the appellant’s older brother, and the distinction between a school and the mosque is simply too uncertain.
Impermissible reliance on plausibility as an indicator
17. While plausibility may be a valid indicator of credibility, it must be approached with caution. In HK v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2006] EWCA Civ 1037, Neuberger LJ emphasised that inherent improbability, though useful in many domestic cases, can be a dangerous or wholly inappropriate factor in asylum claims. The fact-finding tribunal must be alert to the risk of applying domestic standards of reasonableness to societies with customs and circumstances unfamiliar to them, particularly where the country in question is experiencing serious dislocation or instability. This echoed R. (Wani) v Secretary of State [2005] CSOH 73, where Lord Brodie held that rejection of an account on grounds of implausibility must be based on reasonably drawn inferences and not mere conjecture or speculation; actions that appear implausible by Scottish standards might be plausible when considered within the context of an appellant’s social and cultural background, but a decision maker is entitled to draw on their common sense and ability, as a practical and informed person, to identify what is or is not plausible. The Upper Tribunal in KB & AH (credibility–structured approach: Pakistan) [2017] UKUT 491 (IAC) similarly held that plausibility is a valid indicator, but one that requires a measured and culturally sensitive approach.
18. We first turn to the Judge’s conclusion that the appellant being a child was inconsistent with his account of having entered into a sexual relationship with his sister-in-law:
28. The Appellant repeatedly referred in his oral evidence to being a child at the time of events in Iran. This cannot be reconciled with his alleged undertaking of sexual relations with his sister in law. He states that the sister in law would call him upstairs to ask for assistance every so often and there were no suspicions about anything. This is implausible.
19. The appellant’s age is common ground between the parties, meaning that the appellant would have just turned 16 years old when the sexual relationship began. It is unclear whether the Judge thinks that the appellant’s claim to be a child was suspicious, given he was old enough to enter into a sexual relationship, or whether it is implausible that a 16 year old would wish to enter into the sexual relationship. Either way, we cannot make sense of the Judge’s thinking on this point. Mature sexual function being accompanied by immature understanding and decision-making is such a plausible teenage characteristic as to hardly need stating.
20. We likewise reject that the appellant’s uncle being angry at him yet still assisting him to escape being murdered is a matter upon which the Judge was rationally entitled to place significant adverse weight. It would be an understandable reaction of a family member to wrongdoing in this country, and cannot be reliably designated as implausible in the appellant’s culture. While the Judge was entitled to find it unlikely that the sister-in-law would assume the grave risks that would follow being caught committing zina, and that this weighed in the balance against credibility, he expresses himself in absolute terms that neither she nor the appellant would take such risks and that this is “implausible and incredible”. Clearly sexual transgression does take place in every society, even in the face of the most severe punishment.
21. The other aspects of the account that the Judge found implausible, such as the relationship going undetected for so long, and the somewhat fantastical account of the appellant’s rooftop escape from his brother, were legitimate adverse indicators in the sense described in KB.
Conclusion
22. If just one or two minor indicators in the Judge’s assessment were removed from the balance, we would find those errors immaterial to his overall conclusion. It can be seen from the above, however, that a large and substantial part of the credibility assessment simply cannot stand. What is left is not insubstantial either, consisting of the major inconsistency as to the weapon wielded by the appellant’s brother, and several legitimate implausible aspects, and this has given us pause for thought. Nonetheless, due to the requirement that credibility be decided in the round, we cannot find that a negative outcome was inevitable; the appellant’s account of his brother’s work could be considered to positively support his credibility.
23. The Judge’s findings must therefore be set aside, as must the decision to dismiss the appeal. Given the extent of fact-finding required, applying the Practice Direction in accordance with Begum (Remaking or remittal) Bangladesh [2023] UKUT 46 (IAC) it is appropriate to remit the appeal to the First-tier Tribunal with no facts preserved. We need not address the final ground of appeal concerning risk on return.
Notice of Decision

(i) The decision of the First-tier Tribunal involved the making of an error of law and is set aside.
(ii) The case is remitted to a differently constituted First-tier Tribunal for re-hearing, with no facts preserved.

UTJ Neville

Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

31 October 2025