Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-003748

PA/67225/2024
LP/01753/2025

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:
On 25 November 2025

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE BRUCE

Between

IO (UZBEKISTAN)
(anonymity order made)
Appellant
And

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:

For the Appellant: -
For the Respondent: Mr Parvar, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 16 October 2025

DECISION AND REASONS
1. The Appellant is a national of Uzbekistan born in 2003. He appeals with permission against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal dated 18 July 2025 to dismiss his appeal on human rights and protection grounds.
2. The Appellant arrived in the UK in July 2022 with a seasonal worker visa. He claimed asylum on 2 January 2024. There were two limbs to his claim. First he asserted a fear of his cousins, who are said to blame him for their father’s death. The relevant background is that Appellant accidentally caused a fire in a shop which caused extensive damage. The shopkeeper demanded reparation and the Appellant’s uncle came forward to pay him; the two men had an altercation and the uncle subsequently died. The second limb of the Appellant’s claim is that he was arrested, detained and tortured by the Uzbek authorities upon suspicion of being a member of a proscribed Wahhabi group; he avers that summons’ have been issued and that he is a wanted man.
3. Whilst the Respondent accepted that the Appellant is Uzbek, and that he may have caused a fire in a shop, she did not accept he was at risk. She rejected the remainder of the account, finding it to be vague and inconsistent. The first issue that the First-tier Tribunal had to determine, therefore, was whether the account was a credible one.
4. At the hearing before the First-tier Tribunal the Appellant was represented, by a Mr M Hasan of Lexwin Solicitors. He was cross examined and the decision was reserved. The Tribunal dismissed the appeal having agreed with the Respondent that the account was vague and inconsistent.
5. The Appellant applied for permission to appeal to this Tribunal on five grounds of appeal. By his decision of 18 August 2025 First-tier Tribunal Judge Seelhoff granted permission on all grounds, although I do note that he did not think that any of (1)-(4) had any merit. I therefore deal with each ground in turn, noting that by the date of the appeal in the Upper Tribunal the Appellant was without representation; I have therefore read the written arguments presented on his behalf with particular care.

Ground 1: Approach to Credibility
6. Part of the Appellant’s account was that whilst he was still living in Uzbekistan he had been arrested by the security services and tortured. When asked in his asylum interview to give details about what had happened to him, he had replied [at Q60] that a “variety of things” had been done to torment him, and that he had stitches on his body. He then said that he had been forced to sit in a chair whilst they hit him in his abdomen. He had been cut/slashed so badly in his abdomen that he could not swallow food. He had received stiches to a cut on his chin. On appeal to the First-tier Tribunal the Appellant then produced a letter said to be from a hospital in Uzbekistan. This states that he had been admitted there in May 2022 for treatment to a shoulder injury, bruises on his lower right leg and a broken toe on his left foot. Of this evidence the First-tier Tribunal said this:
“19. In his oral evidence, the appellant stated he was tied to the chair. When they hit him, he swore at them, then they hit his legs; they squeezed his legs and “you can see on my neck where they stepped on me too.” When asked why his injuries to his abdomen and neck were not mentioned in the hospital letter, the appellant stated: “I was injured but obviously not in a severe level, I got treatment to my legs and my arms mainly.” In his oral evidence therefore, the appellant stated he was not injured severely, however in his interview, he stated that he was injured so severely to the abdomen that he could not swallow easily and was regurgitating his food. I find that if the appellant’s toe was broken, as stated in the hospital letter, or if he was cut and required stitches on his chin and slashed so severely to the abdomen that he could not swallow without regurgitating, as stated in the interview, he would not have stated that he was not severely injured.
20. I find that there are significant inconsistencies between the appellant’s accounts of his injuries and treatment received and as compared to the hospital letter’s description of injuries. I have considered whether trauma may have played a part in his difficulties recalling an accurate history of events during torture. However, there are serious injuries and treatments claimed in the interview that are simply not mentioned in the hospital letter. I therefore reject the notion that trauma is to blame for his inconsistent accounts”.
7. The Appellant submits that this reasoning is flawed for error of law. The grounds assert that the First-tier Tribunal failed to consider the medical evidence holistically with the evidence overall, and in light of what is known about the ability of torture victims to narrate their experiences.
8. I am not satisfied that there was any error in the Tribunal’s approach. It was certainly entitled, for the reasons that it gives, to conclude that there were significant inconsistencies between the account of the injuries provided by the Appellant, and what was said in the hospital letter. The Tribunal gave express consideration to the notion that the Appellant may be traumatised, but in any event there was before the Tribunal no expert evidence of any description: there was for instance no scarring report, or psychological assessment.
9. I should note that before me the Appellant raised a new point, which did not feature in the grounds. That was that the interpreter provided for his interview did not understand everything he said, and that he spoke a different dialogue. Because the Appellant was unrepresented I have considered that. Having done so I conclude that there has been no error in the First-tier Tribunal’s approach here: this is a point that does not appear to have featured in the submissions made to the First-tier Tribunal; I can find no reference to it. I further note that it appears to be a different explanation to the one the Appellant offered for the discrepancies at the hearing, which was that he had not actually been injured to a severe level.

Ground 2: Duty to Verify
10. The Appellant had produced a number of documents in support of his claim, including a death certificate said to relate to his uncle, and summonses. The Tribunal considered these documents ‘in the round’ with the Appellant’s testimony, in accordance with the guidance given in Tanveer Ahmed [2002] UKIAT 00439. Having done so, it concluded that they were not reliable or in the alternative that they did not materially add to the claim.
11. The grounds assert that the Tribunal “did not consider whether the Respondent had a duty to verify key documents, especially where they were central to the claim and plausibly sourced”. This is, with respect to the author of the grounds, plainly unarguable, since the Tribunal specifically considered this submission as a preliminary matter:
“Issue (i) Should the respondent verify the appellant’s documents?
14. No; the burden of proof rests on the appellant and I will consider the documents in the round, pursuant to the decision in Tanveer Ahmed. In QC (verification of documents; Mibanga duty) China [2021] UKUT 00033 (IAC) the UT held:
“37…The IAT's decision in Tanveer Ahmed remains good law. The overarching question for the judicial fact-finder will be whether the document in question can be regarded as reliable. An obligation on the respondent to take steps to verify the authenticity of the document will arise only exceptionally (in the sense of rarely). This will be where the document is central to the claim; can easily be authenticated; and where (as in Singh v Belgium) authentication is unlikely to leave any "live" issue as to the reliability of its contents. It is for the Tribunal to decide, in all the circumstances of the case, whether the obligation arises. If it does, the respondent cannot challenge the authenticity of the document in the proceedings; but that does not necessarily mean the respondent cannot question the reliability of what the document says. In all cases, it remains the task of the judicial fact-finder to assess the document's relevance to the claim in the light of, and by reference to, the rest of the evidence.”
15. The case of Singh v Belgium concerned a case where the UNHCR could easily confirm whether or not the appellants had been recognised as Afghan refugees in India. This is not such a case; it was not clear to me that any of the documents would be easy to authenticate; none of the documents are such that their authentication would leave no live issues outstanding. Even if all the documents were authentic, it was not clear to me that they were connected in any way to the factual claim made by the appellant concerning membership of a Wahhabi proscribed extremist organisation. It is for the judge to determine the issue of authenticity based on the evidence presented.
12. I can find no error in this reasoning. Ground 2 is not made out, as it amounts to a disagreement with the Judge’s conclusions.

Ground 3: Private Life
13. Ground 3 concerns the First-tier Tribunal’s finding that the Appellant’s lawful exit from Uzbekistan was an indication that he was not wanted by the authorities as he claimed. The grounds submit this to be irrational reasoning “inconsistent with established case law” and contrary to evidence produced by the Respondent:
“In YB (Eritrea) v SSHD [2008] EWCA Civ 360, it was held that the ability to leave a country does not negate risk on return
“The fact that an individual was able to leave their country lawfully does not, by itself, mean they were not at risk from the authorities or that their asylum claim lacks credibility”
CPIN guidance (Uzbekistan – Actors of Protection) accepts that individuals may exit even while wanted, due to corruption or inefficiency”.
14. I reject the contention that the finding was irrational. It was, on the contrary, an obvious and rational conclusion for the Tribunal to have drawn. Although I have absolutely no reason to conclude that the Appellant is aware of this, the references to YB (Eritrea) and the CPIN in the grounds are wholly false. YB is not an authority for the proposition asserted, and does not contain that quote. There is no CPIN entitled ‘Uzbekistan – Actors of Protection’. As such these assertions in the written grounds will be the subject of separate directions in light of the guidance in MS (Professional conduct; AI generated documents) Bangladesh [2025] UKUT 00305 (IAC).

Ground 4: Sufficiency of Protection
15. The First-tier Tribunal held that if the Appellant was concerned about any potential risk from his cousins, he could simply move somewhere else in Uzbekistan and/or seek the protection of the Uzbek government. Ground 4 submits that the Tribunal has here failed to address the “high threshold for effective protection” set out in HH (Somalia) v SSHD [2010] EWCA Civ 426”. Again, the grounds are misleading. HH (Somalia) is not authority for the proposition that there is a “high threshold” insofar as sufficiency of protection is concerned. That decision does no more than reiterate the existing text. It is primarily concerned with assessing the safety of travel to a place of internal flight and it is not clear to me how that impacts on the present case.

Ground 5: JCK (Botswana)
16. I now turn to the only ground that Judge Seelhoff considered to have any merit. That is that the Tribunal failed to properly apply the two-stage test mandated by section 32 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and considered in JCK (Botswana) [2024] UKUT 00100. The grounds say this:
“In JCK (Botswana), the Upper Tribunal clarified the proper approach under Section 32 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which applies to asylum claims made on or after 28 June 2022.
The Tribunal failed to properly apply the two-stage test under Section 32, particularly by treating credibility issues under a higher standard than appropriate for future risk assessment.
The Judge did not clearly separate findings on past events from the question of whether there is a real risk of persecution on return, as required by JCK (Botswana).
The judge did not adequately distinguish between:
• The balance of probabilities standard for establishing the factual basis of the claim;
• And the reasonable degree of likelihood standard when assessing future risk of persecution.
This resulted in an elevated and incorrect approach to credibility and risk, contrary to Karanakaran v SSHD [2000] 3 All ER 449 and R v SSHD ex p Sivakumaran [1988] AC 958”.
17. I confess that I am unable to understand these grounds, or why permission was granted on them. The First-tier Tribunal expressly directs itself to s32 NABA 2022 and the decision in JCK at its paragraph 11 and 12 and there is nothing in the body of the decision to indicate that it did other than apply the appropriate standards at the appropriate junctures. The Tribunal had rejected the credibility of the Appellant’s claimed fear, and it follows that there can have been no error in its assessment of risk, since that would have been the same whatever standard it applied.

Decisions
18. The appeal is dismissed.
19. There is an order for anonymity in this ongoing protection claim.

Upper Tribunal Judge Bruce
Immigration and Asylum Chamber
19th November 2025