Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2025-003094
PA/01194/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:
On 18th of September 2026

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE BRUCE

Between

PL (GEORGIA)
(anonymity order made)
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

For the Appellant: Ms Glass, Counsel instructed by Stone and Co Solicitors
For the Respondent: Mr McVeety, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

At: Bradford on the 16 September 2026

Anonymity
Unless and until a tribunal or court directs otherwise, the Appellant is granted anonymity. No report of these proceedings shall directly or indirectly identify him or any member of his family. This direction applies both to the Appellant and to the Respondent. Failure to comply with this direction could lead to contempt of court proceedings.

DECISION AND REASONS

1. The Appellant is a national of Georgia born in 1987. He appeals with permission against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal to dismiss his appeal on human rights and protection grounds.

2. The basis of the Appellant’s claim was that he has a well founded fear of persecution in Georgia for reasons of his imputed political opinion. He is, it is accepted, a former special forces soldier who served in the Georgian armed forces for a number of years, including a period of exemplary service in the international coalition in Afghanistan. The core of his account is that after leaving the army he repeatedly refused the demands of the police: to join the force, to serve as a covert informant, and to accept payment to mobilise voters during the 2022 election period. He says that this course of refusals culminated in his being attacked and stabbed in the abdomen by plainclothes police officers on 20 February 2022, following which he fled Georgia.

3. The First-tier Tribunal rejected his claims. It did not accept that refusing to be involved in corruption/election manipulation could found a claim under the Refugee Convention. It found reason to doubt his credibility on its own assessment of whether a stab wound to the abdomen could be considered life threatening. The evidence about whether, as a reserve, the Appellant might be recalled to service was unclear. It found the Appellant’s evidence to be vague, and that the “only evidence of harm to him is the stabbing in February 2022”; there was nothing to suggest that this was perpetrated by anyone other than a “rogue police officer” or that the state would fail to protect him. The Appellant was able to continue living in Georgia after this incident and there was no evidence that anyone was looking for him.

4. The Appellant now has permission to argue that the First-tier Tribunal erred in its approach in several key respects.

Error of Law

5. I find that sufficient of the Appellant’s grounds are made out to the extent that the decision of the First-tier Tribunal must be set aside.

6. The first error is that the Tribunal appears to have misunderstood section 32 Nationality, Asylum Borders Act 2022 (NABA 2022). The Tribunal correctly directs itself at its paragraph 9 that this section requires it to apply a two-stage test:

“I must first determine the following matters on the balance of probabilities:

i. whether the Appellant has a characteristic which could cause them to fear persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion (or has such a characteristic attributed to them by an actor of persecution), and

ii. whether the Appellant does in fact fear such persecution in their country of nationality as a result of that characteristic”.

7. As explained in JCK (Botswana) [2024] UKUT 00100 (IAC) [at 13], and indeed the Respondent’s own refusal letter in this case, the task of the decision maker in evaluating question (i) is simply to assess whether this is a claim capable of engaging the Refugee Convention. Put simply, the question raised by s32(2)(a) (framed by the First-tier Tribunal as question (i)) is whether, taking the claim at its highest, there is a Convention reason. Question (ii), as the First-tier Tribunal frames it, requires the decision maker to assess whether the Appellant is in fact afraid. Having directed itself appropriately, the First-tier Tribunal then says this:

“12. The Appellant is seeking asylum for a Convention reason based on his imputed political opinion. The Appellant needs to demonstrate on a balance of probabilities that he would face persecution because of his imputed political opinion. He claims to fear the state as he has refused to work as a member of the riot police force by dispersing peaceful protestors as it was against his beliefs. Further, he refuses to participate in the elections. There is no indication that the Appellant has come to the adverse attention of the state because of his political opinion, imputed or otherwise as he claims to fear one particular police officer in his home area. I am not satisfied, therefore, the treatment the Appellant fears reaches the threshold required by NABA 2022 in respect of the Refugee Convention”.

(emphasis added)

8. Ground 1 argues that here the First-tier Tribunal has conflated the two questions and in doing so has wrongly excluded this claim from the ambit of the Refugee Convention. The Appellant’s skeleton argument explains very well why this was an erroneous approach:

“Having recorded that the Appellant “claims to fear the state as he has refused to work as a member of the riot police force by dispersing peaceful protestors as it was against his beliefs” and that “he refuses to participate in the elections”, the judge concluded: “There is no indication that the Appellant has come to the adverse attention of the state because of his political opinion, imputed or otherwise as he claims to fear one particular police officer in his home area.”

That reasoning discloses three errors. First, it conflates the two distinct questions which s.32 NABA 2022 requires to be addressed sequentially: whether the Appellant has (or is attributed) a relevant characteristic, and whether he fears persecution because of it.

The judge answered neither question; she moved directly to a conclusion about “adverse attention” without first determining whether the repeated refusals to serve the political ends of the police (riot deployment against protesters; covert informing; paid electoral mobilisation) constituted or attracted an actual or imputed political opinion.

Secondly, the judge gave no reasons why a man attacked for refusing to participate in riot policing and electoral manipulation did not manifest, at the least, an imputed political opinion. On the Appellant’s account the police’s interest in him was precisely political, he was a decorated soldier whose refusals were treated as defiance of the ruling party’s apparatus, culminating in a polling station confrontation. If the judge considered that this could not amount to imputed political opinion, she was required to explain why; the absence of any reasoning is itself an error of law, and any finding that such treatment was apolitical was not rationally open to her.

Thirdly, the characterisation of the claim as fear of “one particular police officer in his home area” mischaracterises the evidence, which described a course of conduct by the police as an institution over several years not a private grudge held by a single officer. A material mischaracterisation of the case advanced is a further error of law. The error is plainly material: it foreclosed the Refugee Convention limb of the appeal at the threshold and infected the framework within which the humanitarian protection and Article 3 claims were then assessed (state actor versus “one rogue police officer”, sufficiency of protection, and internal relocation at [30], [32] and [36])”.

9. I agree with all of that. I might add, in respect of the final paragraph, that I have been unable to identify the evidential basis upon which the Tribunal felt able to characterise the Appellant’s assailant/s as a single “rogue” officer.

10. That leads me to ground 2, which is that the First-tier Tribunal gave inadequate, and/or irrational reasons for its conclusions in respect of the Appellant’s claim to have been stabbed by undercover police officers. The Tribunal accepted that the Appellant was stabbed in the abdomen in February 2022, that the wound injured his intestine, that bleeding areas were surgically stitched and that abdominal drainage was performed. Having accepted all of that, the judge held that the medical evidence “does not support the Appellant’s claim that he had received a life-threatening injury”, reasoning that he was discharged three days after surgery and recuperated at home. Before me Mr McVeety accepted that this finding was irrational and/or made without evidential basis. I agree that this was a concession properly made. A penetrating abdominal wound perforating the intestine and requiring emergency surgery and drainage is, on any rational view, an injury capable of being life-threatening; the judge herself acknowledged that “it may well be that had the Appellant not been admitted to hospital the injury would have become life threatening”. The fact that the Appellant recovered after surgery says little about the gravity of the injury inflicted. I agree that the Judge inferred from the Appellant’s supposed exaggeration of his injury that his evidence was to be doubted overall.

11. Grounds 1 and 2 and therefore made out. Ground 3 makes the same points in respect of the human rights claim and so adds nothing.

12. Ground 4 is that there was a procedural impropriety in that the decision records oral evidence supposedly given by the Appellant, which he now claims he did not say. At the stage when the Appellant sought permission to appeal he was unrepresented and simply asserted this matter, attributing the alleged errors to poor interpretation at the hearing. In granting permission to appeal Upper Tribunal, Judge O’Brien directed that if this ground were to be pursued, then a recording of the hearing would need to be obtained, and detailed particulars given of where, if anywhere, the mistranslation occurred. The Appellant now has representatives, but they have only very recently come on record, just a few days before the hearing. They did not therefore have time to comply with Judge O’Brien’s directions. There was some discussion at the hearing about whether the matter should be adjourned to enable the Appellant to pursue this ground. In the end this did not prove necessary since Mr McVeety was prepared to accept that the errors identified by grounds 1 and 2 infected the entire decision to the extent that it would need to be remade de novo with no findings preserved. For that reason I make no finding on ground 4.

Decisions

13. The decision of the First-tier Tribunal is set aside.

14. The parties, and I, are in agreement that due to the extent of fact finding required the most suitable forum for the re-making of this claim would be the First-tier Tribunal. I therefore remit the matter to be heard de novo by a judge other than Judge P. Hands.

15. There is an order for anonymity in this ongoing protection appeal, made because I consider that there is a strong public interest in maintaining the integrity of the Refugee Convention framework, such that the presumption in favour of open justice is in this case outweighed.

Upper Tribunal Judge Bruce
Immigration and Asylum Chamber
16 September 2026