Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-004316

First-tier Tribunal No: RP/50026/2024
LR/00089/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:
On 8th December 2025

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE McWILLIAM

Between

SS
(ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Appellant
and

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr L Youssefian, Counsel instructed by Wilson Solicitors LLP
For the Respondent: Mr E Tufan, Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 13 November 2025

Order Regarding Anonymity

The Appellant has been granted anonymity by the FTT.

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 her or any member of her family. Failure to comply with this order could amount to a contempt of court.

DECISION AND REASONS
1. The appellant is a citizen of Iran. He was granted asylum on 7 February 2019 and LTR until 6 February 2024. He is a foreign criminal, having been convicted of possession with intent to supply class A drugs and an offence relating to property. For those offences he received a custodial sentence of three years.
2. The Secretary of State for the Home Department (SSHD) has not sought to deport the appellant and does not currently intend to. It is acknowledged by the SSHD that the appellant is at risk on return to Iran. On this basis deportation would be unlawful. The appeal concerns whether the appellant’s status in the UK.
3. The respondent notified the appellant on 31 January 2025 that she intended to exclude him from the Refugee Protection pursuant to s.72 of the NIAA 2002 on the grounds that the offences he committed were particularly serious and that the appellant constitutes a danger to the community.
4. The appellant appealed against this decision. The appeal was not under Article 8 ECHR. There was no need to balance the appellant’s family and/or private life against the public interest in deportation. The first issue that the judge had to resolve was whether the appellant had committed a particularly serious offence. He found that he had. The second issue for the judge was whether the appellant had rebutted the presumption that he constitutes a danger to the community. The judge found that on the evidence before him, the appellant had rebutted the presumption.
5. The FTT (Judge Boyes) granted the SSHD permission to appeal against the decision of First-tier Tribunal Judge Jarvis to allow the appeal under the Refugee Convention. I note that the grant of appeal. The judge said that individually the grounds are not the strongest although he also said that the grounds effectively merged into one. He also said that the complaints are not the strongest but found they crossed the “threshold”.
6. The issue for me to determine is whether the judge, as contended by the respondent, erred in his conclusion that the appellant had rebutted the presumption.
7. I remind myself that the law says that I must exercise caution when determining whether the FTT has erred in law. I summarise the applicable principles from KM v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] EWCA Civ 693 AH (Sudan) v SSHD [2007] UKHL 49, AA (Nigeria) v SSHD [2020] EWCA Civ 1296, MA (Somalia) v SSHD [2010] UKSC 49 and Volpi & Anor v Volpi [2022] EWCA Civ 464:
1. The First-tier Tribunal is an expert tribunal, and an appellate court should not rush to find a misdirection an error of law merely because it might have reached a different conclusion on the facts or expressed themselves differently
2. The UT should not interfere with the trial judge's conclusions on primary facts unless it is satisfied that he was plainly wrong.
3. The UT should not be astute to characterise as an error of law what, in truth, is no more than a disagreement with the UT's assessment of the facts.
4. Where a relevant point is not expressly mentioned by the First-tier Tribunal, the court should be slow to infer that it has not been taken into account.
5. The UT is an appellate court, and it is bound, unless there is compelling reason to the contrary, to assume that the First-tier Tribunal judge has taken the whole of the evidence into his consideration. The mere fact that the First-tier Tribunal does not mention a specific piece of evidence does not mean that he overlooked it.
6. Experienced judges in this specialised tribunal are to be taken to be aware of the relevant authorities and to be seeking to apply them without needing to refer to them specifically.
7. Reasons for judgment will always be capable of having been better expressed. An appellate 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.
8. Decisions should be respected unless it is quite clear that the First-tier Tribunal has misdirected itself in law.
9. The focus should be on the way the First-tier Tribunal performed the essence of the task required

The grounds of appeal
8. There are three grounds. They overlap. They are essentially a complaint that the judge was wrong to take into account the appellant’s employment, relationship and church going as constituting a different factual matrix from that when the appellant committed the offences. The factors were in existence before the appellant committed the offences. It is contended that the judge gave inadequate reasoning in respect of what he found to be protective factors. It is contended that the judge did not take into account that anger and aggression (in addition to drug addiction) were factors leading to the appellant’s criminality.
The findings of the FTT
9. The judge’s findings can be summarised:
a. The appellant lied to his probation officer about alcohol use.

b. The appellant is not currently engaged in criminal activity and not currently taking drugs.

c. The appellant is highly vulnerable when not taking his medication

d. The appellant plays an important quasi-parental role in the life of his partner’s daughter and this is a different factual matrix to that which existed at the time he was offending.

e. The appellant has found some real assistance from attending the gym, working on his health and from starting employment for a few hours a week on a construction site since June 2024. The judge accepted Mr Youssefian’s submission that this amounted to a significantly different factual scenario from 2020.

f. The appellant’s engagement with the gym and work on his own physical health is not trivial and has had a positive impact on his mental health.

g. The appellant has engaged more with the church since his release from prison.

h. The judge took into account that the risk of offending was assessed as low. The judge had regard to JZ (Colombia) v SSHD [2008] EWCA Civ 517 (see [48] and [49]) concluding that the predictor scores were not negligible and that the chances of risk must be given due weight.

i. The judge found at [51] and [52] that the appellant “has just made out his claim, on balance, that he does not present a real risk of danger to the community. I have come to this conclusion on the basis of the totality of the evidence, unchallenged by the Respondent, that the Appellant has materially changed his personal circumstances including a quasi-parental role for his partner’s daughter…….these are not superficial or immaterial challenges to his personal life and I find that they are crucial to his abstinence from criminality and drugs since his release from prison in 2022”

j. The judge gave weight to the evidence showing that the appellant found the experience of prison in the UK extremely difficult (as a factor to support the chances of committing further offences)

Conclusions
10. The parties relied on skeleton argument, and they made oral submissions which I engage with in my conclusions.
11. In respect of a different factual matrix, the evidence that the judge accepted was the appellant had engaged more with the church since his release from prison on 1 June 2022. This finding was open to him on the evidence. In respect of the appellant’s employment, Mr Tufan in response to Mr Youssefian’s submissions drew my attention to the appellant’s evidence that he was trading in saffron at the time of offending. Having considered the decision, it is my view that the judge did not proceed on the basis that the appellant was unemployed at the time of the offence rather he attached significance to his employment since June 2024 on a construction site. The evidence before the judge was that the appellant was in a relationship with a different woman than at the time of offending. The judge accepted that this was not a toxic relationship. He heard evidence from the appellant and his partner and was entitled to reach this conclusion. On the basis of the lawfully sustainable findings the judge was entitled to conclude that there was a different factual matrix, and protective factors were in place that were not present when the appellant committed the offences. Moreover, the judge was entitled to attach significant weight to the appellant’s “active involvement with the gym and work on his own physical health” as a protective factor. What weight to attach to the evidence was a matter for the judge. The findings are grounded in the evidence and adequately reasoned.
12. The grounds raised the evidence of the appellant that his present partner discourages him from taking medication. This was a factor that the judge considered in the round, noting that despite this the appellant was still taking his medication.
13. I have considered the comments in the OASys report relating to anger and aggression. I do not find that the judge did not engage with this. The evidence before the judge included that the appellant has a long psychiatric history. It supported that aggression was linked to bi-polar disorder and drug use. This is made clear when reading [24], [25]-[27] of the decision. There was a very long history of mental health in Iran and the UK. It is clear that the judge considered the anger and aggression issues in the context of the appellant’s mental health generally. There was no requirement for the judge to engage with aggression and anger as distinct from the appellant’s mental health. The respondent relied on what is said in the OASys report at p28. However, this supports that the judge rationally considered anger and aggression in the context of the appellant’s mental health generally. The report says in respect of the appellant’s aggression in custody, “as largely due to a decline in [the appellant’s] mental health, having been isolated for months, and being unable to communicate with persons”.
14. Mr Tufan raised an issue not pleaded in the grounds that the judge had erred in the assessment of the predictor scores with reference to MA (Pakistan) [2014] EWCA Civ 163 at [19] per Elias LJ. To summarise what was said in MA, what may be an assessment of low risk for the purpose of criminal sentencing is not necessarily a low risk when looking at the future behaviour of the applicant. The ground has not been properly pleaded and, in any event, it is without substance. The judge at [49] considered the predictor scores and said that in his view they were not negligible and must be given due weight. The predictor scores were one of several factors in the mix when making an evaluative assessment. MA is a case where the Court of Appeal were considering Article 8 ECHR where there is a need for a balancing exercise and weight must be attached to the public interest.
15. The factors that the judge took into account were sufficient for him to conclude that the appellant had rebutted the presumption that he constitutes a danger to the community. The decision is grounded in the evidence and adequately reasoned.
16. There is no error of law.

Notice
17. The SSHD ‘s appeal is dismissed.

Joanna McWilliam

Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

2 December 2025