Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER
Case No: UI-2025-004640

First-tier Tribunal No: PA/02453/2020

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 29th of January 2026

Before

DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE SYMES

Between

OI (NIGERIA)
(anonymity order made)
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Himself
For the Respondent: Mr E Tufan

Heard at Field House on 1 December 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 appellants, 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

1. The Appellant, a citizen of Nigeria born 27 March 1986, appeals against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal of 25 July 2025 dismissing his appeal brought against the Respondent’s refusal of 4 March 2020 of his asylum claim (made via further representations in December 2019).

Background

2. The appeal has rather a chequered history and I will adopt the labelling of each previous appeal decision used by Judge Ahmed for the First-tier Tribunal (though the Second, Third and what I now style the Fourth Appeals are in fact decisions in the same appeal before and after remittal from the Upper Tribunal, not separate proceedings). The Appellant's original asylum claim was refused on 22 December 2016 and the First Appeal was dismissed by Judge Coll on 21 July 2017. Further submissions of 9 December 2019 were refused on 4 March 2020 though treated as a fresh asylum claim and thus carrying a right of appeal; the Second Appeal was dismissed on 4 March 2021 (by Judge Lawrence) though permission to appeal was granted to the Upper Tribunal and the matter was remitted for re-hearing. The Third Appeal was heard by Judge Barrowclough who determined the appeal without being aware of Judge Lawrence’s dismissal of 4 March 2021 and unfortunately (so the parties agreed before me) then committed the same error of law which had led to the appeal’s remittal previously; thus the matter was again remitted, and it is against the subsequent decision of Judge Ahmed that the appeal before me (the Fourth Appeal) arises.

3. The Appellant's claim arises from his gender preference; he first realised he was not heterosexual around the age of fourteen. His partner’s sister caught them having sex in January 2008 and raised the alarm; they were beaten by the neighbours and held for three nights by the police. He left his home town and travelled to Port Harcourt where he was helped to leave the country by a Lebanese man who took pity on him; he arrived in the UK in March 2008. Following unsuccessful applications for EEA residence cards from 2014 to 2016 on the basis of a relationship with a Portuguese woman that ultimately foundered due to his true sexuality, he was arrested and detained in relation to an alleged assault in August 2016 and removal directions were set for December 2016; he originally claimed asylum on 12 November 2016. One aspect of the Appellant’s claim is his asserted same-sex relationship with a man in the UK, KRM. But the central issue is details of his asylum claim being published in a series of Nigerian newspapers following a data breach at Duncan Lewis solicitors in March 2018.

The (Fourth) Appeal to the First-tier Tribunal

4. Judge Ahmed on the Fourth Appeal correctly treated Judge Coll’s decision on the First Appeal as the starting point applying Devaseelan. Judge Coll had found

(a) The Appellant was not credible in his claim to be homosexual or bisexual.

(b) He had never been involved in a same-sex relationship in Nigeria or the UK.

(c) A newspaper article of 24 January 2017 said to evidence his alleged mistreatment in Nigeria in January 2008, and the fact of his sexuality being public knowledge there, was faked. No explanation was given for why the page numbering was inconsistent, why the page containing the article allegedly referring to the Appellant was on a different type of paper to the rest of the paper or why the article about him was in darker print than the rest of the extracted pages.

5. Evidence now adduced by the Appellant on the Fourth Appeal included:

(a) Articles from Nigerian newspapers (Vision Online Magazine and FACT Magazine) (giving a detailed account of the January 2008 incident and of the Appellant's departure from Nigeria via the Lebanese man’s assistance, and recounting that he remained on police bail for the crime of sodomy) in July and August 2017. The Nigerian Falcon reported in July 2017 that the Appellant remained wanted.

(b) A statement that appears to emanate from Duncan Lewis solicitors’ website of 23 March 2018 referring to a hack on their IT systems which they had reported to their regulators and the seriousness of which they were investigating with external IT forensics services; an article from the Law Society Gazette confirming that “hackers have infiltrated the IT system of a national firm to harvest data before attempting to spread data through social media”.

(c) A news story from the Roll on Friday dated 10 January 2020 relating to a data breach following a hacking incident at the Appellant's former advisors Duncan Lewis solicitors in March 2018, in which an individual identified as “Dean” was directly threatened by the hackers that confidential details from his asylum claim would be published if he did not assist in extracting a ransom from Duncan Lewis. Various confidential documents were subsequently sent to other law firms.

(d) An article from NewsDirect of 8 January 2020 referring to a data breach at a British law firm which had placed the Appellant's details into the public domain, summarising the media coverage his asylum claim had previously received; a further article from NewsDirect of 7 February 2020 naming the Appellant as one of the perverted children of debauchery who had tarnished Nigeria’s reputation abroad; he would be recognised on return, reported to the police, and punished by the full force of the law and the fists of ordinary citizens.

(e) An affidavit from Taiwo Sobogun of February 2020, a friend of the Appellant, setting out that he had sent the Appellant copies of various newspaper articles, both in 2017 and more recently, and that the Appellant had asked him to send them again via Mr Sobogun’s own Nigerian lawyers.

(f) A letter of 24 February 2020 from a Nigerian lawyer, Chinelo Madueke, stating that her client had brought her attention to “damaging news articles” and that “I can confirm that I have read the news article and I can verify that it is not only grievously damaging to his person, rather it portends ill consequences such as imprisonment or inhumane treatment … His photograph, I observed has been circulated also in the national media … My client purchased these (newspapers) from the vendors and I have confirmed on the internet to be from a reputable media company here in Nigeria.”

(g) Transcripts/screenshots of online conversations with men and letters from men with whom he claimed to have been in a relationship.

(h) Letters regarding his sexuality from two people he said were his close friends, several letters from ex-partners, one from KRM’s mother, one from his current partner and one from a lady from his church.

(i) A Country Expert Report of 31 March 2020 from Professor Yusuff giving his opinion on the possible consequences of the return of a homosexual or bisexual man to Nigeria.

(j) Letters from Dr Ndlovu, a private GP who the Appellant visited in 2020, referring to being told by the Appellant that he was a victim of torture, at one point referring to a medical report from when the Appellant was in detention in 2016 that mentions intercourse with a male in Nigeria.

6. The Fourth Appeal was dismissed because Judge Ahmed concluded there was insufficient reason to depart from Judge Coll’s findings in the First Appeal, having regard to the further evidence now advanced.

(a) The Appellant had been vague as to significant dates in his history, regarding the dates newspaper articles were published and as to the timing of his relationship with KRM.

(b) He was vague in his description of his relationship with men from whom screenshots of conversations were provided. He was unclear as to whether he had ever met one of them, Dean, in person.

(c) The authors of the supporting letters had not provided witness statements or attended to give evidence in person.

(d) Little could be inferred from the photographs said to show him with men with whom he had had a relationship: one set appeared to have been taken at a single event so did not show an enduring relationship, another set numbered only three pictures. There was no evidence of online conversations with ex-partners of the type one could reasonably expect to see in a relationship conducted over long distance for a reasonable period of time.

(e) The letters from Dr Ndlovu added nothing to the assessment of the Appellant’s sexuality, referring only to being told by the Appellant that he was a victim of torture and not mentioning his claimed sexuality. This post-dated his detention and proposed expulsion to Nigeria and so did not pre-date his asylum claim.

(f) The Roll on Friday report from 2020 dated from some two years after the leak and did not mention the Appellant. Duncan Lewis could presumably have confirmed whether the Appellant’s records were part of the data breach on request.

(k) The letter from the lawyer Ms Madueke re the article in the Nigerian NewsDirect did not clearly explain how it was that she had confirmed its genuineness and no explanation had been provided for why the DHL envelope said to have contained that letter appeared to be addressed to Duncan Lewis, but that from the Nigerian lawyer was addressed to Globalstatus Law, a different firm; and the sender’s name and the letter’s date were illegible on the copy envelope provided.

The Appeal to the Upper Tribunal

7. Grounds of appeal contended that the First-tier Tribunal had erred in law in the Fourth Appeal by:

(a) Confusing the articles from the Roll on Friday and NewsDirect: the former was provided as corroboration of the data breach and the latter of the Appellant's details having subsequently entered the public domain in Nigeria.

(b) Making a material error of fact regarding a matter not raised at any of the hearings so far, as to the Nigerian lawyer’s letter being addressed to Globalstatus law rather than to Duncan Lewis: by the time that letter was sent in October 2021 the Appellant was represented by the former firm, whereas the DHL envelope had contained a letter to Duncan Lewis in August 2017.

(c) Making the same mistake regarding the NewsDirect letter as was previously made in the Second and Third appeal decisions from Judges Lawrence and Barrowclough.

8. Permission to appeal was granted by the First-tier Tribunal on 16 September 2025 on the basis that all the grounds were arguable.

9. Before me the Appellant represented himself, and clearly had a good understanding of the nature of the appeal proceedings and the relevant issues. He developed the grounds of appeal and explained that Duncan Lewis had been no longer able to act for him as he no longer qualified for legal aid. Globalstatus then took over his case and at some other point in his history, DCK Solicitors took him on. The accusations against him in the Nigerian media only appeared after the data leak, which was the only possible explanation for details of his asylum claim appearing online.

10. For the Respondent Mr Tufan submitted that the Judge below was correct about illegibility so far as could be seen. The data breach, whilst undoubtedly true, was not established as involving the Appellant. The First-tier Tribunal had given many reasons for disbelieving the Appellant's account, having taken account of all relevant evidence, and any infelicities in its treatment of the documents could not justify interfering with its decision.

Analysis

11. I do not consider that the Tribunal below made any significant error regarding the documentary evidence adduced by the Appellant. It must be recalled that his primary case of persecution for reasons of a same-sex gender preference has been resoundingly rejected more than once by different judges. On the latest occasion he had again foregone the opportunity to have any witness attend so that their evidence could be tested. A judge re-hearing his appeal was entitled to treat any further arguments he made with a degree of scepticism. The agency UNHCR, which supervises asylum determination at global level, is on record as suggesting that “a more stringent evaluation” is appropriate where the primary asylum claim has already been rejected (see eg the letter from Peter van der Vaart of UNHCR cited in Danian [1999] EWCA Civ 3000). Although before me the Appellant suggested that the alleged media coverage of his case in Nigeria could be explained only by the Duncan Lewis data breach of March 2018, in fact he has previously provided media reports from July 2017, well before that breach took place. Those reports were nevertheless rejected as reliable evidence in the Tribunal below.

12. The Appellant's residual argument is that a data breach experienced by his former lawyers had led to confidential information about his asylum claim entering the public domain which in turn has stirred up further difficulties for him in Nigeria. I do not accept that Judge Ahmed was confused about the relevance of the Roll on Friday article of January 2020: the point he made was that the article, whilst confirming the fact of the data breach itself, did not go on to identify the Appellant as a data breach victim, a matter that presumably could have been confirmed by Duncan Lewis on request at any time in the seven years since it had occurred.

13. Whilst it is true that a potentially corroborative letter from the Nigerian lawyer Ms Madueke had been put forward, the fact remained that, rather surprisingly, she appeared to have limited her investigation to checking whether the media outlet from which her client Mr Sobogun had supposedly obtained a newspaper article was a genuine one. She did not go on to undertake the rather more telling enquiry which one would expect to have been made, ie to check the original source for herself to ensure that the media outlet’s recorded output truly contains that article. Judge Ahmed was incontrovertibly entitled to take that point as counting against the article’s reliability.

14. Matters of fairness are to be assessed by the Upper Tribunal itself directly on appeal, without deference to public law notions of relevancy or rationality: SH (Afghanistan) [2011] EWCA Civ 1284. Judge Ahmed took the point regarding which law firm was representing the Appellant at any particular time unfairly given it appears it was not raised at the appeal hearing. I accept that the Appellant had discharged himself of the services of Duncan Lewis at the relevant time and was not responsible for this error of fact. The Appellant should have been given an opportunity to answer this concern. But in the context of the other points in relation to the documentary evidence made against him being unassailable, it seems to me that this was a very marginal consideration in the Judge’s reasoning which did not significantly bear on her conclusions overall. As Moses LJ stated in SH (Afghanistan): “Tribunals, like courts, must set aside a determination reached by the adoption of an unfair procedure unless they are satisfied that it would be pointless to do so because the result would inevitably be the same”. To my mind it would be pointless to require this appeal to once again circulate around the appeal system only to receive a further inevitable adverse determination.

Notice of Decision

The decision of the First-tier Tribunal did not involve the making of an error of law.
The appeal is dismissed on all grounds.

Mark Symes

Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

27 January 2026