Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-001771
First-tier Tribunal No: PA/64794/2023
LP/06304/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 6th of November 2025

Before

Deputy upper tribunal JUDGE Kelly

Between

OO
(ANONYMITY ORDERED)
Appellant
and

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr, K Wood, Counsel instructed by Immigration Advice Service
For the Respondent: Mr N Wain, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer.

Heard At Bradford on the 12th 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 appellant, likely to lead member of the public to identify the appellant. Failure to comply with this order could amount to a contempt of cou

DECISION AND REASONS
Introduction
1. The Appellant is a citizen of Nigeria. She made a protection and human rights claim on the 19th November 2021, which the respondent refused on the 23rd November 2023. Judge Khan dismissed her appeal against that refusal on the 26th November 2024. Permission to appeal against that dismissal was granted by Upper Tribunal Judge Lodato on the 3rd June 2025. Thus, the matter came before me.
The appellant’s case
2. The essence of the appellant’s protection claim before the First-tier Tribunal was that she has a well-founded fear of harm on return to Nigeria because she coordinated and attended a demonstration in October 2020 in support of the ‘End SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) Movement’. The consequent risk to her safety is enhanced by the fact that she is a well-known model and actress in Nigeria and the daughter of a local politician.
Findings of the First-tier Tribunal
3. Judge Khan did not find the appellant’s account credible because she -
(i) provided false information (concerning the level of her salary) when completing her UK visa application form [17 – 19],
(ii) provided a vague and limited account of her claimed political activities, her ‘celebrity status’ in Nigeria, and having received threats of harm [23, 25, 28, 38, 41],
(iii) gave an inconsistent account of her role in the End SARS Movement in her oral and written evidence [24],
4. Having, “found the Appellant not credible on core parts of her claim”, the judge went on to find that the report of Dr Xavier Moyet (a Nigeria country expert) “does not take the Appellant’s claim much further and for that reason … I attached limited weight to the report” [42]. Similarly, and for the same reason, the judge was “not persuaded that the objective evidence and caselaw takes the Appellant’s appeal much further” [43].
The grounds of appeal.
5. The grounds of appeal concerning Judge Khan’s credibility assessment can be conveniently summarized as follows:
(i) The judge failed to treat the appellant as a vulnerable witness irrespective of the fact that this had not been raised at the hearing.
(ii) The judge failed to consider the possibility that the appellant may have given a truthful account of events in Nigeria notwithstanding the false statement she made in her visa application form.
(iii) The judge considered the country expert report in isolation after having already made their adverse credibility findings in relation to her claim.
(iv) The judge failed to make findings as to whether the appellant would be politically active on return to Nigeria and thus be at risk of persecution.
Analysis
6. I take the grounds in turn.
7. Mr Wood accepted that those representing the appellant before the First-tier Tribunal had not raised the question of whether the appellant should be treated as a vulnerable witness. He nevertheless argued that given the welter of evidence concerning her potential vulnerability was something that the judge should have raised of their own volition. When I asked Mr Wood how the failure to do so may have affected the outcome of the appeal, he suggested that the appellant’s vulnerability provided a potential explanation for what the judge otherwise found to be the “vague and limited” nature of her evidence of her political activities in Nigeria. However, the necessary consequence of the failure by the appellant’s representative to advance an argument concerning the potential impact of appellant’s mental health problems upon her credibility was to deprive the respondent of an opportunity to address it. This is illustrated by the fact that when the judge did consider what they found to be the “somewhat limited evidence” concerning the appellant’s mental health difficulties [70 to 73] they did so within the wholly different context of a potential claim for inhuman treatment under Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which seems to have been the sole basis upon which the appellant’s representative argued that the medical evidence was relevant. I moreover note that the medical notes to which Mr Wood drew my attention in support his argument that the judge should have raised the matter of their volition were served by Notice under Rule 15(2A) of the Procedure Rules. That Notice describes the accompanying medical notes as, “new evidence [which is] not being relied upon to establish a material error of law but would be relevant to a rehearing of the appeal”. Finally, I note that the judge expressly found (albeit upon limited evidence and within the context of Article 3) that the evidence did not indicate “significant mental health issues”. For all these reasons, I conclude that the first ground of appeal does not establish a material error of law.
8. Had the judge treated the appellant’s admission that she had made an untruthful statement in her visa application form as determinative of her credibility on other matters, then there would have been force in the second ground of appeal, namely, that the judge, “generalised their adverse conclusions on the Appellant's credibility to the overall account” [13]. As it is, all that the judge found (and was entitled to find) was that the appellant’s provision of false details to secure a visa, “damages her credibility” [19]. That was a statement plain common sense, and it clearly indicates that the judge considered the appellant’s conduct within a rounded assessment of her credibility as a whole. There is accordingly no merit in the second ground of appeal.
9. In granting permission to appeal, Judge Lodato suggested that the third ground of appeal may have the most substance and I now to turn to consider this.
10. Judge Khan considered the credibility of the appellant’s account of events in Nigeria by analysing each aspect of the appellant’s claim in turn and in the following order: (i) the false statement in the visa application form (see the preceding paragraph, above) [17 to 19], (ii) the appellant’s coordination of and participation in the End SARS protests [20 to 25], (iii) her posts on social media [26 to 29], (iv) her claimed “celebrity status” [30 to 34] and employment in Nigeria [35 and 36], (v) her claimed receipt of threats to her life [37 and 38], (vi) the claimed political status of her father [39 and 40] and, finally, (vii) “ongoing threats to family” [41]. It is fair to say that the judge found that the evidence in support of each of these aspects of her claim was either lacking or less than credible. Save for that concerning the false visa statement (considered above), the grounds of appeal do not take issue with this part of the judge’s analysis. The criticism that is made in the third ground of appeal, however, concerns the judge’s consideration of the report of Dr Xavier Moyet and the general background country information reports. That consideration came after the judge findings on the other aspects of the evidence, as listed above, and reads as follows -
Expert report (Dr X M)
42. The Appellant has submitted an expert report. I have carefully considered the expert’s opinion and I have noted the considerable background information provided within the same. With regards to the Appellant’s individual circumstances, I note that the expert is reliant on the documentary evidence submitted by the Appellant. In view of my findings above and as I have found the Appellant not credible on core parts of her claim, I find that the expert’s report does not take the Appellant’s claim much further and for that reason I attached limited weight to the report.
Objective evidence and case law
43. The Appellant’s representative has referred to objective evidence and the second ASA refers to caselaw. In view of my findings above relating to the Appellant’s credibility, I am not persuaded that the objective evidence and caselaw takes the Appellant’s appeal much further.
The criticism of this analysis is that it offends against the legal principles identified at paragraph 24 of the well-known case of Mibanga v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] EWCA Civ 367. For convenience, I set this paragraph out in full-
It seems to me to be axiomatic that a fact-finder must not reach his or her conclusion before surveying all the evidence relevant thereto. Just as, if I may take a banal if alliterative example, one cannot make a cake with only one ingredient, so also frequently one cannot make a case, in the sense of establishing its truth, otherwise than by combination of a number of pieces of evidence. Mr Tam, on behalf of the Secretary of State, argues that decisions as to the credibility of an account are to be taken by the judicial fact-finder and that, in their reports, experts, whether in relation to medical matters or in relation to in-country circumstances, cannot usurp the fact-finder's function in assessing credibility. I agree. What, however, they can offer, is a factual context in which it may be necessary for the fact-finder to survey the allegations placed before him; and such context may prove a crucial aid to the decision whether or not to accept the truth of them. What the fact-finder does at his peril is to reach a conclusion by reference only to the appellant's evidence and then, if it be negative, to ask whether the conclusion should be shifted by the expert evidence. Mr Tam has drawn the court's attention to a decision of the tribunal dated 5 November 2004, namely HE (DRC - Credibility and Psychiatric Reports) [2004] UKIAT 00321 in which, in paragraph 22, it said:
"Where the report is specifically relied on as a factor relevant to credibility, the Adjudicator should deal with it as an integral part of the findings on credibility rather than just as an add-on, which does not undermine the conclusions to which he would otherwise come."
11. In responding to this criticism, Mr Wain referred to JL (medical reports-credibility) [2013] UKUT 145 in which the Tribunal observed that where medical reports rely heavily on the account given by the person concerned, this may reduce very considerably the weight that can be attached to them. Given that Dr Moyet had assessed the risk to the appellant of returning to Nigeria upon the premise that her account of her history and her involvement in the End SARS Movement would be accepted, it followed that the judge was entitled to attach little weight to that assessment. However, whilst this argument holds good insofar as Dr Moyet's opinion relating the risk on return is concerned [paragraphs 17 to 20], it does not do so insofar as their report covers country conditions in Nigeria [paragraph 14] and, more particularly, the history of the End SARS protests [paragraph 15]. This is because Dr Moyet’s report and the background country information reports together provided the context within which the plausibility of the appellant’s account of her involvement in those protests fell to be assessed. It was accordingly incumbent upon the judge to assess the extent to which the ‘objective evidence’ supported the plausibility of the appellant’s account and to attach due weight to it as part of a holistic evaluation of the totality of the evidence before reaching any settled conclusion concerning the appellant’s credibility. What the judge in fact did, however, was precisely that which the Court of Appeal cautioned against in Mibanga, namely, to conclude that the appellant’s core claim was “incoherent and implausible ... such that her evidence is incapable of belief” [24, 34] before going on to consider the objective evidence as an ‘add on’ that did not shift the conclusions to which they had already come. That was a clear error of law.
12. Mr Wain argued, in the alternative, that the any such error of law was immaterial to the outcome of the appeal. In support of this argument, he drew attention to the fact that the expert had not been asked by those who commissioned their report to evaluate the plausibility of the appellant’s account of events, and the expert had accordingly not done so. Whilst it is true that the expert did not expressly comment upon the plausibility of the appellant’s account of events by reference to the background country information, this did not relieve the judge of the obligation to do so. It may have been, for example, that having considered the detail of the external evidence concerning the EndSARS protests, the judge would have concluded that material aspects of that evidence were inconsistent with the appellant’s account of them, thereby undermining the overall credibility of her claim. On the other hand, the judge may have concluded that the details contained within the external evidence supported the plausibility of her account of events, thereby enhancing its overall credibility. Given that the judge did not conduct this exercise, it is impossible now to say that the error of law I have identified was immaterial to the outcome of the appeal. I have accordingly concluded that the judge’s findings must be set aside in their entirety and the matter remitted for a complete rehearing.
13. Although Mr Wood also argued the fourth ground of appeal (the failure of the judge to assess the likelihood of the appellant becoming involved in further political protest on return to Nigeria) I am satisfied that this is incapable of affecting the outcome of the present appeal given that (a) past behaviour of a claimant generally provides a good guide to their future conduct, and (b) I have in any event set aside the judge’s findings in relation to the former.

Notice of Decision
1. The appeal is allowed.
2. The decision of the First-tier Tribunal is set aside.
3. The appeal is remitted to the First-tier Tribunal for complete rehearing before a judge other than Judge Khan.

David Kelly Date: 24th October 2025

Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber