Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-002873

First-tier Tribunal No: PA/59311/2023

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 2nd of December 2025

Before

DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE ANZANI

Between

DD
(ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Appellant
and

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:

For the Appellant: Mr S. Winter, Counsel instructed by Latta & Co Solicitors
For the Respondent: Ms C. Newton, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 11 November 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

Introduction
1. The Appellant appeals against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal dated 09 May 2025, which dismissed his appeal against the Respondent’s decision of 19 October 2023 refusing his protection and human rights claim.
Background
2. The Appellant is a Vietnamese national. He claims that, in early 2016, he posted comments on Facebook alleging that local traffic police were accepting bribes. He states that, as a result, he was detained for two days in January 2016 and beaten. Following his release, he posted further comments describing his mistreatment, after which he was detained again for two days in February 2016 and subjected to further beatings.
3. The Appellant worked in Vietnam as a fisherman. On 14 February 2017, he claims to have joined other villagers travelling to participate in a protest concerning pollution of their fishing grounds by the Formosa company, an event reportedly organised by a local priest. En route, the group were stopped by police and violence followed. The Appellant states that he managed to flee but received a police summons two days later. He did not attend in response to the first summons and received a second summons the following month. When he did attend on that occasion, he claims he was beaten and warned not to post further material on Facebook or participate in demonstrations. On 10 April 2017, he was issued with a Residence Restriction Order limiting his ability to leave his township. He states that continued police harassment thereafter led him to leave Vietnam using a false passport.
4. The Appellant arrived in the United Kingdom on 20 July 2021 and claimed asylum on arrival. He contends that he cannot return to Vietnam because he would face further harassment and ill-treatment by the authorities, and that he is also at risk owing to his illegal exit from the country and his Catholic faith.
First-tier Tribunal appeal
5. Before the First-tier Tribunal, the Respondent disputed all aspects of the Appellant’s account.
6. The Tribunal heard oral evidence from the Appellant. He relied on an expert report prepared by Dr Tran Thi Lan Anh dated 26 April 2024, together with original copies of a police summons, a Residence Restriction Order, and a letter from the priest said to have organised the 14 February 2017 protest.
7. The First-tier Tribunal Judge (“the Judge”) dismissed the appeal, finding the Appellant’s account not to be credible. The Judge considered Dr Tran’s report to be of limited evidential value, expressing concerns about the author’s expertise in document verification and uncertainty as to whether original documents had been inspected. The Judge attached minimal weight to the Vietnamese documents and the priest’s letter due to doubts regarding their provenance, late disclosure, and perceived inconsistencies in their form and content. The Judge further found that the Appellant had failed to provide easily obtainable corroborative evidence, had given conflicting accounts of key events, and that his conduct attracted an adverse credibility inference under section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004. In consequence, the Judge did not accept that the Appellant had been detained or targeted by the authorities, had illegally exited Vietnam, or would face harm on return for any reason advanced, and accordingly dismissed the appeal..
Grounds of appeal
8. The Appellant sought permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal on the following grounds:

(i) The Judge erred in law by irrationally questioning the expert’s qualifications and failing to properly engage with her stated experience in verifying similar documents, thereby leaving the informed reader in real doubt as to why her expertise was discounted;
(ii) The Judge acted unfairly and irrationally in assessing the documentary evidence, including by failing to clarify whether the expert had examined the original documents, by making unsubstantiated findings about stamps, text, and paper quality without relevant expertise, and by relying on those findings to undermine the documents’ reliability; and
(iii) The Judge erred in concluding that the documents could not be easily verified without explaining why straightforward verification steps, such as contacting the issuing police authority, could not have been undertaken by the Respondent.
9. On 01 July 2025, First-tier Tribunal Judge Seelhoff granted the Appellant permission to appeal on all grounds.
Decision and reasons
10. The Supreme Court in HA (Iraq) v SSHD [2022] UKSC 22 reiterated that judicial caution and restraint are required when considering whether to set aside a decision of a specialist tribunal. In particular, judges of the specialist tribunal are best placed to make factual findings. Appellate courts should not rush to find misdirections simply because they might have reached a different conclusion on the facts or expressed themselves differently: see AH (Sudan) v SSHD [2007] UKHL 49 and KM v SSHD [2021] EWCA Civ 693. Where a relevant point is not expressly mentioned by the tribunal, the court should be slow to infer that it has not been taken into account: see MA (Somalia) v SSHD [2020] UKSC 49. When it comes to the reasons given by the tribunal, the court should exercise judicial restraint and should not assume that the tribunal misdirected itself just because not every step in its reasoning is fully set out: see R (Jones) v FTT (SEC) [2013] UKSC 19. I have kept these considerations in mind when coming to my decision.
11. Having carefully considered the submissions of both parties, I am satisfied that the Judge’s decision is vitiated by material errors of law. My reasons are set out below.
12. Before the First-tier Tribunal, the Appellant relied upon an expert report prepared by Dr Tran Thi Lan Anh, a legal expert specialising in Vietnam and other South Asian countries. In her report, Dr Tran set out her extensive qualifications. She holds a PhD in International Law from the University of Leeds, has researched Vietnam’s legal and political systems since 1994, and previously served for more than a decade as a senior official within the Vietnamese Government. She holds a degree in Law from the School of Law, Hanoi National University. She explains that she is fluent in Vietnamese, regularly conducts fieldwork in Vietnam, and has considerable experience producing in-depth country reports. Critically for the issues in this appeal, she states that she has substantial familiarity with Vietnamese state documentation through both her government work, where she signed official documents and applied state stamps, and her subsequent expert practice, in which she has examined a wide variety of official documents and acted as a legal witness on matters of document authentication.
13. At paragraph 22 of the determination, the Judge questioned how the expert’s undergraduate study of criminal law assisted her in assessing the authenticity of police summonses and related documents. The Judge further reasoned that it was unclear how Dr Tran’s past role as a senior government official equipped her to verify documents such as police summonses or residence restriction orders. This analysis focuses narrowly on two discrete aspects of Dr Tran’s CV and does not engage with the breadth of her stated experience. Dr Tran expressly confirmed that she had previously examined numerous forms of Vietnamese official documentation, including warrants, summonses, orders restricting movement, and identification papers, and had acted as a legal witness on document authentication in both tribunal and court proceedings. These aspects of her experience were directly relevant to her ability to assess the documents in this case. The Judge did not grapple with this evidence or explain why it was insufficient to establish expertise.
14. In these circumstances, the Judge’s conclusion that the expert’s CV did not demonstrate an ability to verify police or other official documents rested on a mischaracterisation of her qualifications and an incomplete engagement with her stated experience. The Judge’s reasoning overlooked the expert’s professional familiarity with Vietnamese official documentation and her explicit assertion that she had examined similar documents previously as part of her expert practice. By failing to consider these material aspects of her expertise, and by relying instead on isolated elements of her CV, I find that the Judge fell into error. I am satisfied that Ground 1 is made out.
15. Ground 2 identifies a further error in the Judge’s approach to Dr Tran’s report. The Judge held at paragraph 25 that it was “unclear” whether the expert had examined the original documents. Yet, at paragraph 1.1 of her report, Dr Tran explicitly stated that she had been instructed to verify four original documents. The Judge did not refer to this, nor did he put any concerns on this issue to the parties before drawing adverse conclusions. Given the express wording of the report, the Judge’s inference that the expert may not have seen the originals was not, I find, reasonably open to him. Moreover, it formed part of the Judge’s reasoning in diminishing the weight attached to the expert’s opinion on authenticity. That conclusion cannot stand in circumstances where it rested on a factual misunderstanding.
16. Ground 2 also challenges the Judge’s reliance on what appears to be his own forensic analysis of the documents adduced by the Appellant and considered by Dr Tran. At paragraph 25, the Judge concluded that all four documents were written on “identical sheets of paper” and that wording and signatures “overlay” the stamps, suggesting that the stamps had been applied before the text. These findings were reached without any evidence that the Judge possessed the specialist knowledge necessary to make such technical assessments. Matters such as paper composition, stamp application, sequencing of ink layers, and the authenticity of official stationery are areas in which decision makers must exercise particular caution in the absence of expert input. In this case, the Judge did not explain why his own visual inspection should be preferred to the conclusions reached by Dr Tran, who stated that she had examined similar Vietnamese official documents in the course of her expert practice. Taken together, these shortcomings materially undermine the Judge’s assessment of the expert evidence. I am therefore satisfied that Ground 2 is made out.
17. The errors identified in Grounds 1 and 2 materially undermine the Judge’s assessment of both the expert evidence and the Appellant’s overall credibility. The determination cannot safely stand and must be set aside in its entirety.
18. Given that conclusion, it is unnecessary to consider Ground 3.
19. For the reasons set out above, I find that the decision of the First-tier Tribunal involved the making of material errors of law. It is accordingly set aside in full.
Disposal
20. Having identified a material error of law, I must now determine whether the appeal should be retained in the Upper Tribunal for remaking or remitted to the First-tier Tribunal.
21. Both representatives submitted that the appropriate course is for the appeal to be remitted to the First-tier Tribunal with no findings preserved. I agree. The Judge’s flawed approach to the expert evidence and his reliance on his own unsupported technical observations fundamentally undermine the assessment of credibility and the integrity of the determination as a whole. The appeal will therefore require a complete rehearing. Given the nature and extent of the fact-finding that will be necessary, I am satisfied that remittal to the First-tier Tribunal is the proper course, consistent with the guidance in Begum (Remaking or remittal) Bangladesh [2023] UKUT.

Notice of Decision
The decision of the First-tier Tribunal, dated 09 May 2025, involved the making of a material error of law.
The decision of the First-tier Tribunal is set aside in its entirety with no findings preserved.
The appeal is remitted to the First-tier Tribunal to be heard de novo before a different judge.

S. Anzani

Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

25 November 2025