Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2025-003752
(PA/57311/24, LP/13601/2024)
UI-2025-003753
(PA/57309/2024)
UI-2025-003754
(PA/57305/2024, LP/13604/2024)

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:
On 4 March 2026

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE BRUCE

Between

AG (ALGERIA)
NT (ALGERIA) + 1
DI (ALGERIA)
Appellants
AND

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:

For the Appellant: Mr Collins, Counsel instructed by BMAP
For the Respondent: Mr Terrell, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on the 8 January 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 First Appellant is a national of Algeria born in 1984. The remaining Appellants are respectively his wife (1986) and two dependent daughters (2020 and 2022). They appeal with permission against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal to dismiss their linked appeals on protection and human rights grounds.
2. The basis of the Appellants’ claim was that they face a real risk of harm being caused to them by a “powerful and connected” individual in the Algerian army. The First Appellant had loaned this man money to start a business. The man had failed to pay him back. In 2017 the First Appellant sued him, and obtained judgment in his favour from an Algerian court. The court ordered that the man repay the money, and serve a sentence of 3 years’ imprisonment for his default. The man still refused to pay, and in 2022 started to threaten the family with violence; the First Appellant was physically assaulted. Then the man accused the First Appellant of having caused criminal damage to a car, for which the First Appellant had been convicted, and sentenced to 6 months in prison. In respect of that matter the Appellants rely upon a US State Department report dated 22 April 2024 which finds prison conditions in Algeria to be “harsh and life threatening”.
3. Although the family had originally sought refugee status on these grounds, prior to the hearing before the First-tier Tribunal it was conceded on their behalf that the facts were not capable of engaging the Refugee Convention. The appeals therefore proceeded on Article 3 and 8 grounds alone.
4. The First-tier Tribunal disbelieved the entire account. It found the evidence of the First Appellant to be inconsistent: no issue is taken with that. The Tribunal also found the documents adduced in support of the claim to be unreliable: Mr Collins submits that in this respect the First-tier Tribunal erred in law so as to undermine the integrity of its conclusions overall.

Discussion and Findings
5. There was, as the grounds of appeal put it, a “raft” of documentary evidence in this case. The Tribunal’s treatment of them is challenged on the following footings by Mr Collins. First, the Tribunal’s remark that “none of the documents can fairly be described as being at the centre of his request for protection” is submitted to be irrational. Second, its decision that the Respondent was under no duty to verify the documents with the Algerian courts is said to be wrong in law, with reliance placed on QC (verification of documents; Mibanga duty) China [2021] UKUT 00033. Finally, the global finding that the Tribunal was unable to place reliance on the documents is criticised as “vague”.
6. I am afraid I am unable to agree that any of those grounds are made out. The documents divide into two main tranches.
7. First, there were various documents relating to a cheque that the debtor is said to have given the First Appellant, which was not honoured by his bank. In the consequent court action the Appellant obtains judgment in his favour, and the debtor is sentenced to prison. The First-tier Tribunal considers these documents between paragraphs 33 and 37 of the decision. It appears to proceed on the basis that these documents are genuine, produced in the context of a civil financial dispute, and comments that the tone of letters from the bank, and indeed the judgment against the debtor, are at odds with the Appellants’ evidence that his debtor is powerful and influential, and able to act with impunity.
8. Next there were the documents relating to the claim that a prosecution was subsequently brought against the First Appellant. His case was that the debtor orchestrated a fake allegation involving another man, a doctor in Tizi Ouzou who was ‘put up’ to allege that the Appellant vandalised his car. In respect of these documents the First-tier Tribunal is more circumspect. It notes first of all that he alleged prosecution is launched prior to the alleged event having occurred. It is unclear why all of this is said to have happened in Tizi Ouzou. The Appellant had obtained letters from a lawyer in Algeria to corroborate his account, but she says nothing about his claim to have been framed in his way, or his claim to have subsequently been assaulted. The Tribunal considers it unlikely that the First Appellant would have failed to mention these matters to the lawyer who was assisting him. Nor does the lawyer explain why, on the four occasions that the Appellant had contact with the Algerian police since the date of his conviction in 2022, they did not arrest him. She makes no mention of any link between the debtor and the Tizi Ouzou prosecution of the Appellant. More fundamentally, reasons the Tribunal, there is no coherent explanation of why the debtor waited until 2022 to start his campaign of persecution against the Appellants, the case against him having been brought some five years earlier. Again, the Tribunal contrasts the facts as advanced by the Appellant with his claim that the debtor is an extremely powerful man: if that is the case, then why can he not simply get the 2017 judgment against him set aside?
9. I pause here to note that all of this reasoning was wholly in keeping with the Tanveer Ahmed obligation to consider all of the evidence in the round. None of that logic can reasonably be described as “vague”. I also note that there is absolutely nothing on the face of the court judgment against the First Appellant to link it to his debtor or the earlier dispute. On the face of it, taken at its highest, he is charged with damaging the car of another man in a hospital car park, when he was visiting his dying grandfather.
10. The question then remains: should the Respondent have taken steps to verify any of these documents with the Algerian authorities? I remind myself of what is said in QC:
(1) The decision of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal in Tanveer Ahmed [2002] UKIAT 00439 remains good law as regards the correct approach to documents adduced in immigration appeals. 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 relied on by an appellant 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 (Application No. 33210/11)), 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 the respondent does not fulfil the obligation, 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.
11. Was that obligation engaged in this case? In Singh v Belgium the sole matter in issue was whether the Sikh claimants were from Afghanistan as claimed: if they were, they would be granted protection. The claimants produced UNHCR documents recording their arrival in India from Afghanistan. Those documents were rejected as unreliable by the domestic court. The ECtHR held that since the possible consequences for the petitioners were significant, there was an obligation on the state to show that it had been as rigorous as possible in its assessment of the grounds of appeal. Since the documents were at the heart of the request for protection, rejecting them without checking their authenticity fell short of the careful and rigorous investigation that was expected of national authorities in order to protect individuals from treatment contrary to Article 3 of the ECHR, when a simple process of enquiry would have resolved conclusively whether the documents were authentic and reliable. Mr Collins submits that this too was such a case. He takes issue with the First-tier Tribunal’s finding that the documents did not go to the “heart of the request for protection”. He submits that the record of the Appellant’s conviction, in particular, was of determinative significance.
12. I am not satisfied that this was a Singh case. Yes the documents were important to the overall assessment of the claim, but this was not a matter where it was at all straightforward or “simple” for the Respondent to run checks. Engaging with a local court house in Tizi Ouzou is not the same as calling the UNHCR, an international body with offices in London. Nor am I satisfied that verification of these documents would have settled all the matters in issue. In QC the Upper Tribunal emphasised that the duty to verify will arise only rarely, no doubt because it will be relatively rare for all three of the conditions set out in this line of caselaw to be satisfied. Here a positive verification would not have settled the case: as the First-tier Tribunal points out, on his own evidence the Appellant had several instances of contact with the authorities in Algeria after his conviction, and he was not imprisoned. This, along with the fact that the debtor was similarly permitted to avoid imprisonment after sentence, threw significant doubt on the Appellant’s claim that he would be imprisoned on return to Algeria.

Decisions
13. The decision of the First-tier Tribunal is upheld and the appeal is dismissed.
14. There is an order for anonymity in this ongoing protection claim.

Upper Tribunal Judge Bruce
Immigration and Asylum Chamber
24 February 2026