Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2025-002776
First-tier Tribunal No: PA/62894/2023

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

28th August 2026

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE RUDDICK

Between

LZ
(ANONYMITY DIRECTION MADE)
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: J. Walsh, Instructed by Spencer West LLP
For the Respondent: S. Keerthy, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 4 August 2026

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 First-tier Tribunal (“FtT”) made an anonymity order in this case on the grounds that the importance of the United Kingdom’s discharge of its obligations under the Refugee Convention outweighed the public interest in open justice in the circumstances of this case. I have not been asked to set that order aside and I agree that it is appropriate that it continue.
2. The appellant is a citizen of China. She arrived in the UK in January 2019 and claimed asylum in March 2021. The respondent refused her asylum claim in November 2023, and in April 2025, the First-tier Tribunal found that her account of events in China and in the UK was not credible and dismissed her appeal. The appellant has appealed to the Upper Tribunal on the grounds that the FtT made three errors in its credibility assessment:
(i) It misunderstood her account and thought that she had been inconsistent when she had not been;
(ii) It applied the wrong standard of proof; and
(iii) It had been unfair to find that there was a material omission from the account the appellant gave at her asylum interview, because the appellant had not been asked any relevant questions.
3. For the reasons set out below, I do not find that any of these complaints is made out.
The appellant’s asylum claim
4. At her screening interview in March 2021, the appellant was not asked why she feared returning to China, but she was asked if she had ever been exploited. She said that she had arranged her travel to the UK through an agent, and that the men who met her on arrival had forced her into prostitution for around one month. She had managed to escape one night when the men guarding her were drunk and left her door unlocked.
5. The respondent interviewed the appellant about her asylum claim in October 2023. She explained that she was afraid to return to China because her ex-husband had borrowed money from a bank and a credit union and had not paid it back. He had borrowed the money in both of their names, without her knowledge. Some people had come to their home “when we still lived together” and threatened them with knives and guns. This was in August 2016. They had divorced in 2018, but the bank had seized her house and her car. She also said that she had been arrested by the police in connection with the debt. They had detained her for one day and one night and threatened that they would torture her to death if she did not repay the loan. They then released her without charge and without conditions. She was asked if her husband had faced “any issues because of taking out loans” and she said that he had not, because “He had a really good relationship with these people”.
6. No one had contacted her directly about the debt since she left China, but people had come to her family home in 2020, looking for her. She was afraid that she would be arrested by the police or harmed by members of the mafia if she returned to China.
7. At her interview, the appellant also gave further details of her sexual exploitation in the UK, which she said had lasted for around a year.
8. On 9 November 2023, the respondent refused the appellant’s protection claim. She rejected the appellant’s account of events in China. She found that the appellant had been vague about the identity of the people she feared, had failed to provide any evidence that the people she feared had connections to the police as she claimed, and had failed to give an adequate explanation for why her husband had not been targeted. The respondent also considered it implausible that the police would have released the appellant without conditions if they had wished to harm her and that she would have been able to exit China lawfully, travelling on her own passport, if she had been wanted by the authorities. The respondent further noted that the appellant had said that the people she feared had not contacted her since her arrival in the UK and had only been to her family home once, and she found that this was inconsistent with them having any ongoing interest in the appellant.
The appellant’s appeal
9. The appellant appealed. In May 2024, she filed her appeal evidence. This included a witness statement providing additional detail regarding events in China. She said that she had not known about the loans her husband had taken out until her arrest, which had been in July 2018. The police had slapped and threatened her, but they had released her after she had promised to pay back the money as soon as possible. She explained that she and not her ex-husband had been arrested because her ex-husband “was very close to the director of the local police”. People from the mafia had then come to her house in August 2018, where she was living with her child and her parents. He husband was “not at home at the time”. She promised that she would repay the debt, and the men threatening her left. She then fled the country.
10. The appellant said that she had lost touch with her family when she fled China, but they had contacted her in 2023, after her father died. That was when she learned that in the summer of 2019, the local court had sent a summons to her home, requiring her to attend a court hearing regarding “disputes over private loans”. She repeated that there had been attack on her home in February 2020, asking about her whereabouts. When her mother said she did not know where she was, the attackers had smashed a lot of furniture. Her mother suffered a heart attack as a result and had been hospitalised again in early 2021. Her father died from stress in 2023, and no one in her family wanted to have any further contact with her.
11. She also gave further details of her exploitation in the UK.
12. The appellant also submitted several documents in Chinese, with certified translations:
(i) An “IOU” dated 6 March 2016, stating that the appellant and her husband were borrowing 150,000 RMB. The monthly interest was 20,000 RMB and the loan was due to be repaid in one lump sum on 6 March 2026. If there was a default or dispute, a lawsuit could be filed in the local court;
(ii) A document entitled “Cerification”. It consisted of one sentence: “[ZL]’s ex-husband owed loans to banks […] and personal usurious loans in China, which was a fact known to several of us”. Three men affixed copies of their ID cards and their thumbprints;
(iii) A “Repayment schedule” issued by the Postal Savings Bank of China, for the period from 2 April 2018 through 2 March 2020;
(iv) A document confirming her ownership of her home, issued in October 2015;
(v) A divorce decree from February 2018;
(vi) A court summons dated 1 June 2019;
(vii) Medical records from January 2021, confirming her mother’s various medical conditions, including heart disease and hypertension; and
(viii) Medical bills for her mother.
13. The appellant also submitted various photographs, country evidence and a skeleton argument.
14. On 29 August 2024, the respondent conducted a review and maintained her decision.
15. On 27 January 2025, the respondent’s Immigration Enforcement Competent Authority (IECA) decided that there were not conclusive grounds to find that the appellant had been a victim of modern slavery. With regard to each aspect of the definition of modern slavery, the respondent concluded that there was “insufficient information available”.
16. In March 2025, the appellant submitted further country evidence.
17. The appeal then came before a panel of two FtT judges for hearing on 31 March 2025.
The FtT’s decision
18. In the challenged decision, at [2], the FtT stated that it considered the appellant to be a “vulnerable witness within the meaning of the Joint Presidential guidance note no 2 of 2010: Child, Vulnerable Adult and Sensitive Appellant guidance.” At [3], it noted that the appellant’s counsel had submitted the trafficking decision of January 2025 and a second skeleton argument on the morning of the hearing. At [4]-[5], it summarised the appellant’s claim and the respondent’s reasons for refusal. The issues in dispute were identified at [6] and the legal framework set out at [7]-[10]. At [11], the FtT found that former victims of trafficking were capable of being members of a particular social group (PSG) but that those fearing loan sharks were not. At [13]-[14], the FtT set out that appellant’s counsel had asked it to make a finding on whether the appellant was a victim of modern slavery.
19. The FtT’s findings begin at [15], under the heading “Credibility”. It gave its reasons for rejecting her account of events in China at [15]-[22], followed by its reasons for rejecting her account of her exploitation in the UK at [23]-[25]. I set out the first two of these paragraphs in full, as they are central to the appellant’s appeal:
“15. We had the opportunity to hear and observe the Appellant’s evidence. Her distress at having to recount a number of aspects of her history was clear, but at the same time, there were also a number of inconsistencies in her account. A clear example of this is that in her oral evidence, the Appellant answered immediately that it was in August 2020 when people from the mafia came to her home when her parents and child were there. Whilst she later amended this to August 2018 in her asylum interview the Appellant said it was in August 2016 [SB 353 at Q 24] and in her witness statement at [11] SB 42 she said it was in August 2018. We conclude as a consequence of this repeated inconsistency that there is a reasonable likelihood that this aspect of the Appellant’s evidence is not true.
16. There was also a material omission. Ms Barry [the respondent’s Presenting Officer] asked the Appellant why, given she said she saw her husband having dinner with the head of police, she did not mention this in response to Q’s 28 and 29 of her asylum interview. The Appellant said she thought she had done this. Ms Barry pointed out that she said in response to Q40 that her husband had a good relationship with the people he took loans from but she did not mention the police. The Appellant responded that these people included the police, although she did not previously mention this.”
20. The FtT further found as follows:
(i) It was implausible that the gang the appellant feared had not targeted her husband, and that she had not informed the police that her thumbprint was not on the loan contract: [17];
(ii) There were two thumbprints on the loan contract; the appellant denied that her thumbprint was one of them, but the FtT did not accept her evidence on this point “not least as it is inconsistent with her claim that the loans were taken out in both names and the contract was relied upon in support of this contention.”: [18];
(iii) The appellant had been asked why she had no evidence identifying the chief of police with whom she said her husband had a good relationship. She had replied that the police chief was dead, which did not explain the absence of evidence of their past relationship: [19];
(iv) It was implausible that her brother would provide her with documents in support of her appeal, given her claim that her family did not want any further contact with her after her father’s death: [20];
(v) The evidence of the appellant’s witness was inconsistent with her evidence with regard to how often loan sharks had harassed her family and how often she was in contact with her family: [21];
(vi) It was not plausible that the friends who had signed the “certification” of her husband’s debts would not help her if she returned to China: [22];
(vii) It was implausible that the men who had imprisoned and exploited her in the UK would not have known that she had her passport or that they would have allowed her to keep it: [23];
(viii) The appellant had claimed that she went to a hospital after escaping from sexual exploitation, but there was no evidence of this: [24]; and
(ix) In the absence of medical records, little weight could be put on the photograph of the appellant with black eyes or on the photographs of medication that the appellant was said to be taking: [24].
21. The FtT concluded at [25]:
“whilst we consider that something adverse has happened to the Appellant which has clearly caused her distress, as this was readily apparent in her presentation and the manner in which she gave evidence, we do not consider in light of the inconsistencies and implausibilities set out above that she has demonstrated that there is a reasonable degree of likelihood that she was trafficked in the manner she claimed. For the same reasons we do not accept her claim that she and not her husband was targeted to repay loans that her husband took out in both their names from banks and loan sharks.”
22. At [26], the FtT applied Tanveer Ahmed to the appellant’s various documents and “considering all the evidence holistically”, dismissed the documents as unreliable “due to the inconsistencies and implausibilities set out above”.
23. Finally, at [27], the FtT found that the appellant’s credibility had been damaged by her delay in claiming asylum but described this as “peripheral” in terms of her credibility overall.
24. In light of its findings, the FtT found at that the appellant would not be at real risk of persecution ([28]) or violations of articles 2, 3, 4 or 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”): [29]. There were no significant obstacles to reintegration and no compelling circumstances that would make the respondent’s decision a violation of the appellant’s rights as protected by article 8 ECHR. The appeal was dismissed on all grounds.
The grounds of appeal
25. Mr Walsh drafted the grounds of appeal. There are two.
Ground One: “The Tribunal has misapprehended core aspects of the Appellant’s case”
26. Mr Walsh makes two submissions under this heading. The first is that the FtT misdirected itself in law in finding that there was a “reasonable likelihood” that appellant’s account of being threatened in her home by the mafia was “not true”. This is described in the grounds as a reversal of the burden of proof but is perhaps more accurately described as setting too high a standard of proof. The second is that the appellant had not, in fact, been inconsistent, because the appellant was describing two discrete “raids” on her home, one in August 2018 and one in February 2020.
Ground Two: “The Tribunal has brought an impermissibly rigid approach to aspects of the evidence in light of her [the appellant’s] particular circumstances”
27. Mr Walsh’s complaint here is about [16] of the FtT’s determination. He cites the appellant’s answers to questions 28, 29 and 40 of her substantive interview. They are as follows:
“28. Question: Did you ever report this to the police?”
Response: It would not be helpful – these people have connections with the police.
29. Question: Are you able to name any individual people that have these connections?
Response: I don’t know any of these people – they cause trouble?
[…]
40. Question: Has he [the appellant’s ex-husband] ever encountered any issues because of taking out loans?
Response: No he has not
(IO – why have you had all of these problems but her hasn’t any?)
He had a really good relationship with these people”
(By way of context, question 28 followed the appellant’s description of the visit to her home by the mafia in 2016, at questions 24-26.)
28. Mr Walsh submits in the grounds that there was no discrepancy between those answers and the appellant’s claim in her oral evidence that she had seen her husband “having dinner with the mafia”. She had said he had a good relationship with them and had not been asked to “particularise the nature of the relationship”. Then at the hearing, she had given “an example of the close relationship”. She had simply “provided more detail” and it was “unfair and perverse” to hold this against her.
29. There was no Rule 24 response.
The Hearing
30. At the hearing before me, Mr Walsh relied on the written grounds of appeal but recast them slightly.
31. With regard to ground one, he argued that the final sentence of paragraph [15] infected the whole decision. The FtT had, essentially, expected the appellant to displace the conclusion that there was a reasonable likelihood that any aspect of her claim was not true.
32. He then accepted that there was an inconsistency about the date of the visit to her home but submitted that it should not have been held against the appellant. The core of the claim had remained the same: her husband had taken out loans in 2016, in which the appellant was implicated; she had then been arrested and interrogated by the police in 2018 and harassed by what she called the mafia. Although the FtT was entitled to put some weight on the inconsistency as to the date of the mafia visit to her home, it should have appreciated that some of the dates she gave at her interview were clearly nonsense, namely 2000 and 2016. The FtT should have had regard to the appellant’s state of mind and recognised that she would “blurt out anything to direct attention away from herself”.
33. With regard to ground two, Mr Walsh submitted that the FtT had criticised the appellant for not mentioning at her interview that she had seen her husband having dinner with the chief of police, but there was nothing in questions 28, 29 or 40 that would have elicited that level of detail. In order to make an adverse credibility finding on this ground, the appellant would have had to have been asked, “What is your evidence that your husband had a good relationship with the police?”
34. Mr Walsh then criticised several of the FtT’s other adverse credibility points, in particular its treatment of the thumbprints on the loan agreement and its finding that it was implausible that the appellant had been targeted, rather than her husband. Because these other adverse credibility points were not “cut and dried”, they were not “strong enough” to remedy the errors at [15] and [16]. I took this to be a submission that the errors at [15] and [16] must have been material, in spite of the other adverse findings.
35. Ms Keerthy made able submissions in response, to which I will refer in my discussion below.
Legal framework
36. In deciding whether the FtT made an error of law, I must bear in mind the principles reiterated in numerous cases, most recently in ECO v BB & Ors [2026] EWCA Civ 97 at [56]:
(i) The FTT is a specialist fact-finding tribunal. The UT should not rush to find an error of law simply because it might have reached a different conclusion on the facts or expressed themselves differently;
(ii) Where a relevant point was not expressly mentioned by the FTT, the UT should be slow to infer that it had not been taken into account;
(iii) When it comes to the reasons given by the FTT, the UT should exercise judicial restraint and not assume that the FTT misdirected itself just because not every step in its reasoning was fully set out;
(iv) The issues for decision and the basis upon which the FTT reaches its decision on those issues may be set out directly or by inference;
(v) Judges sitting in the FTT are to be taken to be aware of the relevant authorities and to be seeking to apply them. There is no need for them to be referred to specifically, unless it was clear from their language that they had failed to do so;
(vi) Reasons will always be capable of having been better expressed. An appeal court should not subject a judgment to narrow textual analysis. Nor should it be picked over or construed as though it was a piece of legislation or a contract.: Volpi & Anor v Volpi [2022] EWCA Civ 464 at [2](6); and
(vii) An appellate court should avoid “island-hopping”. Fage v Chobani [2014] EWCA Civ 5.
37. As the appellant submits that the FtT misdirected itself as to the correct burden and standard of proof, I have also taken into account the detailed guidance on credibility assessment set out in Karanakaran v SSHD [2000] EWCA Civ 11. This includes the following principes that are relevant here:
(i) When deciding whether a person has a well-founded fear of persecution, a decision-maker:
“may have to take into account a whole bundle of disparate pieces of evidence:
(1) evidence they are certain about;
(2) evidence they think is probably true;
(3) evidence to which they are willing to attach some credence, even if they could not go so far as to say it is probably true;
(4) evidence to which they are not willing to attach any credence at all.
[…] the decision-maker is not bound to exclude category (3) evidence as he/she would be if deciding issues that arise in civil litigation.”: [55]-[56]
(ii) “This approach does not entail the decision-maker […] purporting to find “proved” facts, whether past or present, about which it is not satisfied on the balance of probabilities. What it does mean, on the other hand, is that it must not exclude any matters from its consideration when it is assessing the future unless it feels that it can safely discard them because it has no real doubt that they did not in fact occur (or, indeed, that they are not occurring at present).”: [102]
(iii) “Needless to say […] when assessing the future, the decision-maker is entitled to place greater weight on one piece of information rather than another.”: [103]
38. In SR (Iran) v SSHD [2007] EWCA Civ 460, Sedley LJ described the tribunal’s task:
“8. […] it was the AIT’s task, first, to discard any evidence judged to be of no value at all: […] For the rest, the AIT had to take each element of evidence into account for what it was worth. Some of the evidence was worth a good deal to the appellant […] Some of it, in the AIT’s judgment, was less compelling […]
9. There is nothing wrong with the differential levels of proof or disproof of primary facts found by the tribunal. … The law does not demand, at least in this field, that each finding of fact, whatever its degree of certainty or uncertainty, be fitted into a single matrix of risk. The fact-finder's task is, to the extent made possible by the evidence, to find facts, and some facts are more certain than others. It would have been as unjust to the appellant to treat as mere possibilities things which, on the AIT's findings, were highly likely as it would have been to the respondent to treat possibilities of hardship as probabilities.”
Discussion
Ground One
39. I take the second limb of ground one first. As originally put in the grounds, it was that the FtT’s finding that the appellant had been inconsistent about the date of the mafia visit to her home was based on a material mistake about her case. She had not been inconsistent at all, because she had been describing two different incidents, one in 2018 and one in 2020.
40. Mr Walsh did not pursue this submission before me, but for the sake of completeness, I find that it is not made out. As succinctly summarised by Ms Keerthy at the hearing before me, the appellant had clearly said at her substantive interview that the first mafia visit was in 2016. She had then said it was 2018 in her witness statement and 2020 at the hearing. I reject the submission that the appellant must have been referring to the visit to her home after she had left the country when she said that the mafia had visited in August 2020, because the FtT records that she later “amended” her oral evidence to say it was in 2018. In other words, the appellant accepted that she had been referring to the visit at which she was present, and that she had given an inconsistent date. As Ms Keerthy also pointed out, moreover, in her witness statement, she described a visit to her home in February 2020, not August 2020.
41. Nor am I persuaded that the FtT was not entitled to put significant weight on this inconsistency. It was not simply a question of identifying the year in which the visit occurred, but of placing it within the broad timeline of events. At her substantive interview, she clearly said that the visit from the mafia had occurred in 2016, and prior to her divorce:
“9. Question: Please could you summarise your reasons you cannot return to China?
Response: My ex-husband has borrowed money from some banks and from some credit union – he deceived them, there was about 2 million - they got some people to come to my house when we still lived together. They came with knives and guns and threatened us. In 2018 we divorced […]
24. Question: Talking about you specifically, when did your first issue in China begin?
Response: August 2016 – lots of people came to my house where my mother and child were as well – they came with guns and knives, it was terrifying.
25. Question: Who were these people?
Response: They were from the mafia – they wanted money.
(IO – where was your husband at this time?)
I didn’t know – he wasn’t at home a lot
[emphasis added]
42. Nor do I consider that the FtT was required to consider whether the appellant’s inconsistency on this issue reflected her mental ill health. The FtT correctly noted that it had no medical records before it. It had two photographs of boxes of promethazine hydrochloride, dispensed in 2023 and 2024, for insomnia. The one from 2023 shows the appellant’s name. There are then photographs of several other boxes of medication, but nothing to link them to the appellant.
43. As to the FtT having applied the incorrect burden of proof, Ms Keerthy conceded that the language used at the end of [15] was “unfortunate”. However, it must be seen in the context of the decision as a whole. The FtT directed itself to Karanakaran and the standard of proof of a “reasonable degree of likelihood”. It repeated the relevant standard again at [25] when ultimately rejecting the appellant’s account. I am required by the principles listed above at [36] to assume that it applied that standard unless it is clear that it did not. I am also required to look at the substance of the decision, rather than picking over the words used as if it were a statute or a contract.
44. If the FtT had concluded at the end of its consideration of all of the evidence that it was reasonably likely that the appellant’s account was untrue, that would have made it clear that it had applied the wrong standard of proof. But that is not what it did. What it did was to make a finding about one specific aspect of the appellant’s account, before continuing to make a number of further findings about other aspects of her evidence. In accordance with Karanakaran, it was entitled to proceed in this manner, identifying various aspects of the evidence and giving reasons for assigning varying degrees of weight to them. What matters is whether when it came to its final conclusion, it took all the evidence into account and then applied the correct standard of proof. This is what it said it did at [25]-[27], when it referred to the various “inconsistencies and implausibilities” in the appellant’s account and confirming that it had considered them “holistically”.
45. For these reasons, ground one is not made out.
Ground Two
46. I consider that ground two rests on a mischaracterisation of the FtT’s credibility concern. The FtT did not fault the appellant for failing to say at her interview that she had seen her husband dining with the chief of police (far less, that she had failed to say she saw him dining with the mafia, as contended in the written grounds). It faulted her for failing to mention that her husband had any connection to the police at all. This is clearly what the end of [16] means:
“Ms Barry pointed out that she said in response to Q40 that her husband had a good relationship with the people he took loans from but she did not mention the police. The Appellant responded that these people included the police, although she did not previously mention this.”
47. Having read the interview record with care, moreover, I find that the FtT was clearly correct to find that the appellant had never mentioned that her husband had any connection to the police. Indeed, the last sentence of [16] indicates that the appellant accepted this in her oral evidence. It was reasonably open to the FtT to consider this to be a material omission, particularly when the appellant had been asked both who had connections to the police (question 29) and why her husband had ever encountered “any issues because of taking out loans” (question 40). Question 40, moreover, followed a series of questions about the appellant’s arrest, such that it would have been reasonable for the appellant to understand that the “issues” referred to included issues with the police.
48. For these reasons, ground two is not made out.
49. Mr Walsh’s other complaints about the FtT’s reasoning were raised for the first time at the hearing, and only in order to show why the claimed errors at [15] and [16] were material. As I have found that the FtT did not err in the way identified in the grounds, I do not need to address these other claimed flaws in its reasoning.
Notice of Decision
The decision of the First-tier Tribunal dated 16 April 2025 is upheld.
The appellant’s appeal is dismissed.

E. Ruddick

Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

18 August 2026