Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-002040

First-tier Tribunal No: PA/61076/2023

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 28th of November 2025

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE KEBEDE

Between

KP
(Anonymity Order made)
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr I Halliday, instructed by Chung Solicitors
For the Respondent: Mr K Ojo, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 14 November 2025

DECISION AND REASONS

1. The appellant appeals, with permission, against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal which dismissed his appeal against the respondent’s decision to refuse his asylum claim.

2. The appellant, born on 9 July 1992, is a national of Vietnam. He arrived in the UK clandestinely, by lorry, on 15 October 2019 and claimed asylum on 9 December 2019. His asylum claim was refused on 31 October 2023 and he appealed against that decision.

3. In the meantime, on 10 December 2019, a referral was made on the appellant’s behalf to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) in order for the Competent Authorities to make a decision as to whether he was a victim of modern slavery, and on 11 December 2019 the Single Competent Authority (SCA) found that there were Reasonable Grounds to accept that he may be a victim of modern slavery/ human trafficking. On 9 May 2024 the SCA decided that there were Conclusive Grounds to accept that the appellant was a victim of modern slavery.

4. The appellant’s asylum claim can be summarised as follows. The appellant claims to fear persecution in Vietnam because he attended two demonstrations against the Formosa company, on 2 October 2016 and on 14 February 2017. He claims that, after the first demonstration, the police warned him not to attend any further demonstrations and that, at the second demonstration, he was beaten by the police and one of his friends was arrested and detained, and during his detention informed the police of the appellant’s attendance at the demonstration. The appellant claimed that he managed to run away to Dak Lak where he stayed with his uncle in his coffee plantation. The appellant claimed that the police attended his home on 15 and 17 February 2017 and left police summonses with his wife requesting that he attend the police station. He claimed that about a year after his escape his wife came to visit him at the coffee plantation and she was followed there by the police who then raided the plantation 10 days later. He managed to escape from Vietnam and went to Cambodia in October 2018. From there he travelled to Russia and was forced to work there without pay for a year. He was then trafficked to the UK via France and was forced to work in a cannabis farm in the UK for two weeks before escaping and claiming asylum. He claims to be wanted by the police in Vietnam and also to be at risk from the traffickers.

5. The respondent, in refusing the appellant’s claim, accepted that he was a national of Vietnam and that he was a victim of trafficking, although not trafficked in or from his home country, but did not accept that he was of any adverse interest to the Vietnamese authorities. The respondent considered that the appellant had provided inconsistent information without reasonable explanation, as well as a lack of detail in his account. It was not accepted that the appellant was at risk on return to Vietnam from the traffickers and it was not accepted that his return to Vietnam would breach his human rights.

6. The appellant’s appeal against that decision was heard in the First-tier Tribunal on 5 February 2025, by which time the appellant had received the positive Conclusive Grounds decision from the NRM accepting that he was a victim of modern slavery in Russia and the UK. The judge had that decision before him, as well as a country expert report from Dr Tran Thi Lan Ahn dated 23 May 2024. The judge observed that he had not been provided with a copy of the letter of instruction to Dr Tran, and that it was unclear which documents Dr Tran had reviewed in completing her report. The judge also noted that Dr Tran did not speak to the appellant in person at any point in preparing her report. The judge found that, aside from those shortcomings, in terms of background information, Dr Tran’s report did not add significantly to the background information contained with the CPINs referred to in the refusal decision or to the comments contained in Nguyen (Anti-trafficking convention: respondent’s duties) [2015] UKUT 170 (IAC). The judge also found that Dr Tran’s report at times lacked objectivity and failed to provide the range of opinion that was available. He considered there to be little similarities between the circumstances described by Dr Tran in her report and those of the appellant, and he found that Dr Tan’s report, when considering a lack of availability of state support and the risk of the appellant being homeless, failed to take account of the fact that the appellant still had family living in Vietnam.

7. The judge found the appellant’s evidence about the first demonstration he attended to be consistent with the background evidence, but that his evidence surrounding the aftermath of the second demonstration was not so consistent or plausible. The judge found the appellant’s account of his subsequent flight to his uncle and his discovery by the police lacked credibility and plausibility. The judge found it implausible that the police would expend so much time and expense monitoring the appellant’s wife for 20 months when the appellant was one of many thousands of people who had taken part in the Formosa demonstrations, and considered it implausible that, if the police had followed the appellant’s wife to the coffee plantation, they would then have left and only attempted to arrest the appellant 10 days later. The judge considered the two police summonses but accorded little weight to them owing to discrepancies in the documents and concerns about the appellant’s account of how they were obtained. The judge was not persuaded that the appellant’s account was credible and did not accept that he was of any interest to the Vietnamese police. The did not accept the appellant’s account of being trafficked out of Cambodia and did not accept that he would be at risk from the traffickers who had trafficked him to the UK. He did not accept that the appellant was at risk of being re-trafficked. The judge dismissed the appeal on all grounds, in a decision promulgated on 1 March 2025.

8. The appellant sought permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal against the judge’s decision on six grounds. Firstly, that the judge had failed to give adequate or comprehensible reasons for rejecting the Country Expert Report. Secondly, that the judge had, at [28], made a mistake of fact and misunderstood the appellant’s evidence about the police monitoring his wife. Thirdly, that the judge had, at [29], made unreasonable findings about the police summonses, in relation to when the appellant had received them and when he lost contact with his wife. Fourthly, that the judge had, at [30], made unreasonable findings about the police summonses, in relation to the request therein for the appellant to attend at the police station and in relation to the seal on the summonses and the authenticity of the documents. Fifthly, that the judge had, at [33], made a mistake of fact in relation to the appellant’s journey to the UK. Sixthly, that the judge had, at [34] and [37], failed to attribute weight to various matters relating to the appellant being a victim of trafficking out of Cambodia and in Russia and the risk of re-trafficking.

9. Permission was refused in the First-tier Tribunal on all grounds. However, permission was granted in the Upper Tribunal on the first two grounds, albeit that the scope of the challenge was not specifically limited to those two grounds.

10. The matter then came before me for a hearing and both parties made submissions.

Hearing and Submissions

11. Mr Halliday relied upon the skeleton argument he had produced and advised me that he was only pursuing the first three grounds. With regard to the first ground, he submitted that there was a failure by the judge to provide adequate reasons for rejecting the expert report, since there was no explanation as to why the three shortcomings he identified in the report undermined the expert’s conclusions. With regard to the second ground, Mr Halliday submitted that the judge misunderstood how the appellant’s case was put in regard to the surveillance of his wife, which was material given that he made a finding of implausibility on the basis of that error. As for the third ground, Mr Halliday submitted, with reliance upon the case of HA & Anor v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] ScotCS CSIH_28, that there was procedural unfairness arising out of the judge’s findings about the police summonses, as he was not given an opportunity to explain why the summonses were sent to him when they were, whereas if he had been given such an opportunity he would have been able to provide a credible explanation.

12. Mr Ojo submitted, with regard to the first ground, that the judge had not rejected the expert report, but rather had given it less weight because of various shortcomings that he identified. The judge had provided additional reasons for limiting the weight he accorded to the report, including the expert’s failure to fulfil various conditions in Part 3, section 9 of the Senior President of Tribunals ‘Practice Direction of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal’, as referred to at [24] of AAW (expert evidence - weight) [2015] UKUT 673. The judge was entitled to make the observations that he did about the report, and was entitled to have concerns about opinions made by the expert on matters which showed either that she had ignored information provided to her about the appellant’s circumstances, or that she had not been fully informed in the instructions given to her. Mr Ojo submitted that the judge had attached some weight to the expert report and was entitled to accord it the weight that he did. His findings were in accordance with the decision in MS (Zimbabwe) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWCA Civ 941, as referred to in the Respondent’s Review. With regard to the second ground, and the issue of the police surveillance of the appellant’s wife, Mr Ojo submitted that the judge did not only reject the appellant’s claim on plausibility grounds in that regard, but he also identified various inconsistencies and discrepancies in the evidence which entitled him to make the adverse credibility finding that he did. Mr Ojo submitted that the judge was entitled to take a common sense approach when assessing plausibility and to give weight to the matters he identified in making the findings that he did at [29] and [30]. As for the third ground, Mr Ojo submitted that there was no procedural unfairness in relation to the judge’s assessment of the summonses. The appellant was fully aware of the importance of the police summonses and the importance of demonstrating the reliability of the documents, as in HA & Anor v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] ScotCS CSIH_28, and there was therefore no unfairness.

13. In response, Mr Halliday submitted with regard to ground one that the judge had given reasons for not attaching weight to the expert report in relation to the trafficking issue, but not in relation to persecution from the State; with regard to ground two, that it could not be said that the judge would have reached the same decision had he not made the error of fact; and with regard to ground three that the procedural unfairness arose from the appellant not having been given an opportunity to address the issue of the delay in producing the summonses.

Analysis

14. The first ground challenges the judge’s assessment of the country expert report from Dr Tran Lan Anh and asserts that the three “shortcomings” in the report, namely that the Tribunal was not provided with the letter of instruction, that the documents considered as part of the appellant’s appeal supporting documents were not individually listed, and that Dr Tran did not speak to the appellant in person at any point in preparing her report, were not material matters which should have undermined the report. Mr Halliday submitted that in any event those requirements appeared in the Practice Direction for 1 November 2024, but not in the earlier Practice Directions of 13 May 2022 which was the relevant direction at the time the report was prepared. He submitted that the judge had failed to explain why those were matters which were capable of reducing the weight to be given to the report.

15. There are several points to make in response to that ground of challenge. Firstly, as Mr Ojo submitted, the judge did not reject the expert’s report, as the grounds and skeleton argument suggest. Rather, he gave reasons for being able to accord only limited weight to the report, and he otherwise accepted parts of the report but did not consider that it added anything to the background information already before him. By way of example, as Mr Ojo submitted, the judge made findings at [27] in regard to the report supporting the appellant’s evidence about his experience at the first demonstration attended on 2 October 2016. Clearly, therefore, the judge had full regard to the report and gave reasons why he accorded it the weight that he did.

16. Secondly, whilst it may be the case that the 1 November 2024 Practice Direction was not in force at the time the expert’s report was prepared, it was in force at the time of the appeal before the judge, and the judge was therefore entitled to take account of the fact that report did not meet the requirements which were to be expected of such a report. As Mr Ojo submitted, those requirements were there for a reason. The fact that the expert based some of her findings on matters which were not reflective of the appellant’s actual circumstances (such as the availability of family support in Vietnam, mentioned by the judge at [26]) and that she did not refer to the police summonses or comment on their authenticity meant that, without the letter of instruction to the expert and an indication of which of the appellant’s documents were before her, it was not possible to ascertain whether the expert ignored or overlooked information available to her or whether she was simply not fully informed by the appellant’s representatives.

17. Thirdly, and in any event, it is clear that the judge’s conclusions on the expert report were not based only upon those three shortcomings, but that he gave various other reasons for finding the report to be of limited weight. As already stated, he did not consider that the report added significantly to the background information contained in the CPINs, as referred to in the refusal letter. The judge also considered that Dr Tran’s report lacked objectivity and was based upon matters which did not reflect the appellant’s own evidence and circumstances, such as whether the trafficker knew the appellant, and the country from where the appellant was actually trafficked (at [25]) and, as already mentioned, the availability of family support in Vietnam (at [26]). At [30] the judge also noted that the expert made no comments on the police summonses and it was unclear whether they had been considered by her.

18. Mr Halliday submits that, even if the judge gave sufficient reasons in relation to the expert’s opinion on the trafficking issue, he did not do so in relation to the opinion of the expert in relation to the appellant’s claim of persecution from the state. However the judge was entitled to find that the concerns about the expert’s report in one respect undermined the report as a whole, and in any event those concerns were clearly not solely limited to the trafficking issue. The judge specifically addressed the trafficking issue from [33], after reaching his conclusions on the issue of persecution by the state and assessing the expert report. Furthermore, his comments and observations in relation to the summonses were clearly related to the issue of state persecution rather than the trafficking issue. It is clear that the judge had read and considered the report in full and had assessed the appellant’s evidence in the light of that report, and as such, he was perfectly entitled to reach the conclusions that he did. The weight accorded to the report was a matter for the judge, and was fully and properly explained by him. The first ground is accordingly not made out.

19. The second ground asserts that the judge misunderstood the facts of the appellant’s case in relation to the police monitoring his wife. It is asserted that the judge erred by finding it implausible that the police would expend so much time and expense monitoring the appellant’s wife for 20 months, when that had not been the appellant’s evidence. It seems to me, however, that the judge was perfectly entitled to read the appellant’s evidence, at [9] of his statement, where he stated that the police “must have been monitoring her”, as being that they had been monitoring his wife since he had escaped from his home area. The grounds assert that the judge gave no consideration to the possibility that the police might simply have received a tip off from someone who knew the appellant, his wife or his uncle, or that they made one of their periodic visits, discovered his wife had gone, and decided to follow her, rather than having been monitoring her for 20 months. However the judge was not required to speculate and consider other scenarios which had not been presented to him. That was particularly so where the appellant’s evidence, at question 50 of his asylum interview, was that the police had continued to come to his house since his escape looking for him in case he came home. Clearly the appellant’s evidence was that the police maintained an interest in locating him throughout the period since he left his home area, and it was that account, when considered in the context of him having been one of many thousands of people who had taken part in the Formosa demonstrations, that the judge found implausible at [28], as he was perfectly entitled to do.

20. In any event, as Mr Ojo submitted, that was not the only basis upon which the judge made adverse credibility findings in relation to the appellant’s account of his experiences following the second demonstration. At [28] he also found that the appellant’s evidence of the period of time spent at the coffee plantation was inconsistent; he found it implausible that if the police had found the appellant they would then leave and only return to arrest him 10 days later; he found that the appellant’s explanation of how he evaded the police was not consistent ; and at [29] and [30] he found that the appellant’s evidence about the police summonses, including the timing of receipt of the summonses and the lack of further action when he failed to comply with the summonses, lacked credibility. All of those were matters which, in my view, entitled the judge to come to the adverse conclusions that he did when assessing the credibility of the appellant’s account.

21. As for the third ground which challenges the judge’s adverse findings on the police summonses, it seems to me that the judge was perfectly entitled to draw the adverse conclusions that he did at [29] from the delay in the appellant producing the summonses. I reject the assertion that there was procedural unfairness arising from a lack of opportunity for the appellant to address the concerns arising in that regard. Although the respondent, in the refusal decision, stated that “some weight” was given to the documents, there was no outright acceptance of the documents as reliable evidence of adverse police interest, and it was clear from the Respondent’s Review at [9] and [10] that their reliability was an issue still to be determined. The refusal decision specified that there was no acceptance that the appellant was of adverse interest to the authorities, and the appellant would therefore have been fully aware that he needed to demonstrate by his evidence that the documents were reliable evidence of such adverse interest. The period between the documents being issued and the appellant producing them was a matter which, with the benefit of legal representation, he would have been fully aware was a material one and it cannot sensibly be argued that the judge was not entitled to take that into consideration and draw the adverse conclusions that he did.

22. In any event, the delay in producing the summonses was not the only basis for the judge’s adverse findings on the documents. At [30] the judge was concerned about the reliability of the documents on the basis that they required the appellant’s attendance the same day as being issued; that there was writing and a signature on top of the seal and that the expert, despite being an expert in document authentication, had not commented on the summonses; and that no further action had been taken against the appellant despite his failure to attend as required in the summonses and the claimed ongoing interest in him. These were all matters which the judge was entitled to take into account in his assessment of the documents. There was no requirement for the judge to put each and every point to the appellant. As already mentioned above, the appellant was perfectly aware that the reliability of the documents remained in question and he had plenty of opportunity to seek to satisfy the Tribunal that the documents were a true reflection of his circumstances in Vietnam. The findings that the judge made on the documents were accordingly entirely open to him for the reasons cogently given and following his overall assessment of the evidence.

23. For all these reasons I do not find the grounds to be made out. The judge undertook a full and careful assessment of all the evidence and provided detailed and cogent reasons for according it the weight that he did. There were no mistakes of fact giving rise to errors of law, and there was no procedural unfairness in relation to the documents. The judge was entitled to conclude as he did and his decision is accordingly upheld.

Notice of Decision

24. The making of the decision of the First-tier Tribunal did not involve a material error on a point of law requiring it to be set aside. The decision to dismiss the appeal stands.

Anonymity Order

The Anonymity Order previously made is continued.

Signed: S Kebede
Upper Tribunal Judge Kebede

Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

24 November 2025