Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2025-005222
First-tier Tribunal No: PA/62883/2023

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 13th of March 2026

Before

DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE ANZANI

Between

SA
(ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Appellant
and

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr S. Ahmed, Counsel
For the Respondent: Ms J. Isherwood, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 03 March 2026

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 Appellant, 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
Introduction
1. The Appellant appeals against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal dated 6 October 2025, in which a Judge of the First-tier Tribunal dismissed his appeal against the Respondent’s decision of 24 November 2023 refusing his asylum and human rights claim.
Background
2. The Appellant is a national of Albania, born on 7 April 2006. He entered the United Kingdom on 6 September 2022 and claimed asylum on 24 March 2023.
3. The basis of the Appellant’s protection claim was that, as a minor, he had become involved with a criminal gang in Tirana and had been required to transport packages for the gang. He stated that the gang was involved in drug and weapons trafficking and that he had participated in gang-related confrontations with a rival gang in Durres.
4. The Appellant claimed that he was kidnapped and assaulted by members of the rival gang before being rescued by members of the Tirana gang. He subsequently left Albania, travelling to Italy before ultimately reaching the United Kingdom.
5. The Appellant further asserted that after arriving in the United Kingdom he had been exploited in a cannabis cultivation operation before escaping. He contended that he remained at risk from criminal gangs in Albania due to his previous involvement with them and because he had escaped exploitation.
6. The Respondent refused the claim on 24 November 2023. While the Appellant’s nationality and age were accepted, the Respondent did not accept the credibility of the core account or that the Appellant would face a real risk of harm on return to Albania.
Decision of the First-tier Tribunal
7. The appeal was heard before the First-tier Tribunal on 18 September 2025.
8. The Judge heard oral evidence from the Appellant and considered documentary evidence including a country expert report from Professor Dr Dimitrios Dalakoglou and a medical report addressing scarring and injuries.
9. The Judge found the Appellant to be an articulate witness but ultimately rejected the credibility of his account. The Judge concluded that the Appellant’s involvement with criminal gangs had been peripheral and that he would not be sought by gangs on return to Albania.
10. The Judge therefore dismissed the appeal on asylum, humanitarian protection, and human rights grounds.
Grounds of appeal
11. The Appellant sought permission to appeal on several grounds which can be summarised as follows:
(i) The Judge erred by describing the Appellant as having an “extensive criminal history”.
(ii) The Judge failed properly to evaluate the country expert evidence.
(iii) The Judge treated the medical/scarring evidence in a speculative manner.
(iv) The Judge failed adequately to consider evidence relating to continuing interest in the Appellant by gangs in Albania.
12. Permission to appeal was granted by First-tier Tribunal Judge Kudhail on 11 November 2025 on the basis that the grounds were arguable.
Decision and reasons
13. I have considered the First-tier Tribunal decision, the documentation that was before it, the grounds of appeal, and the submissions made at the hearing before reaching my decision.
14. The Supreme Court in HA (Iraq) v SSHD [2022] UKSC 22 reiterated that judicial caution and restraint is required when considering whether to set aside a decision of a specialist tribunal. In particular, judges of the specialist tribunal are best placed to make factual findings. Appellate courts should not rush to find misdirections simply because they might have reached a different conclusion on the facts or expressed themselves differently: see AH (Sudan) v SSHD [2007] UKHL 49 and KM v SSHD [2021] EWCA Civ 693. Where a relevant point is not expressly mentioned by the tribunal, the court should be slow to infer that it has not been taken into account: see MA (Somalia) v SSHD [2010] UKSC 49. When it comes to the reasons given by the tribunal, the court should exercise judicial restraint and should not assume that the tribunal misdirected itself just because not every step in its reasoning is fully set out: see R (Jones) v FTT (SEC) [2013] UKSC 19. I have kept these considerations in mind when coming to my decision.
Ground 1
15. The first ground concerns the Judge’s statement at paragraph [19] of the decision that the Appellant had “an extensive criminal history”.
16. It is common ground that the Appellant had a conviction in the United Kingdom relating to possession with intent to supply a controlled drug and driving without a licence. The Appellant argues that the Judge’s characterisation was factually incorrect because the Appellant had only a single conviction and that this mischaracterisation infected the credibility assessment.
17. I do not consider that this ground establishes a material error of law.
18. When the relevant paragraph is read fairly and in context, the Judge was referring not solely to the Appellant’s conviction in the United Kingdom but to the Appellant’s own account of his activities in Albania. The Appellant’s case was that he had transported drugs and weapons for a criminal gang and had participated in gang-related confrontations.
19. The Judge was therefore entitled to view the Appellant’s evidence through the lens of his admitted involvement in criminal activity. The use of the phrase “extensive criminal history” may have been imprecise, but it does not demonstrate that the Judge relied on an incorrect factual premise regarding the number of convictions.
20. I therefore do not consider that this aspect of the decision discloses a material error of law.
Ground 2
21. Ground 2 contends that the First-tier Tribunal failed properly to evaluate the country expert evidence. The Appellant had relied upon a report from Professor Dr Dimitrios Dalakoglou, an academic specialising in Balkan and East European Studies.
22. The Judge accepted at paragraph [20] that the author was an expert on the region but ultimately attached limited weight to the report. At paragraph [22], the Judge observed that significant parts of the report appeared to be based on anecdotal rather than empirically researched material. The Judge also suggested that the report had failed to take account of the Appellant’s age at the time of his involvement with the gang and his relatively peripheral role within it.
23. I accept that a judge is entitled to scrutinise expert evidence and is not required to accept an expert’s conclusions uncritically. The weight to be attached to expert evidence is a matter for the tribunal. However, where expert evidence is relied upon, the tribunal must engage with the substance of the report and give adequate and intelligible reasons for rejecting or departing from its material conclusions.
24. In the present case, the central thrust of the expert’s evidence was that organised criminal gangs in Albania are capable of tracing individuals within the country and that, in certain circumstances, the effectiveness of state protection against such actors may be limited. These conclusions were directly relevant to the key issues in the appeal, namely the risk to the Appellant on return and the availability of effective protection.
25. The reasoning in the decision does not demonstrate meaningful engagement with those central conclusions. Instead, the report was discounted largely on the basis of a generalised observation that parts of it appeared anecdotal and the Judge’s view that the Appellant’s role within the gang had been limited. While those matters were capable of being considered when assessing the weight of the report, they do not address the substance of the expert’s analysis concerning the capacity of criminal gangs to identify and locate individuals or the effectiveness of protective mechanisms within Albania.
26. Further, the Judge’s criticism that the expert had failed to consider the Appellant’s age and circumstances is not borne out by the report itself. The report was prepared with knowledge of the Appellant’s background and addressed the question of risk on return in light of the Appellant’s personal circumstances, including the passage of time since his departure from Albania.
27. In those circumstances, the reasoning does not demonstrate that the expert evidence was properly evaluated in the context of the evidence as a whole. Rather, the report appears to have been discounted without adequate engagement with its central conclusions or the material upon which those conclusions were based.
28. I therefore conclude that the Judge erred in law in the treatment of the country expert evidence.
Ground 3
29. Ground 3 contends that the First-tier Tribunal engaged in impermissible speculation in its treatment of the medical evidence. It is argued that the Judge suggested alternative causes for the Appellant’s injury without any evidential foundation and without putting those possibilities to the Appellant, thereby rejecting supportive expert evidence on a speculative basis.
30. The Appellant relied upon a medico-legal report prepared by Mr B Sommerlad, a Consultant Plastic Surgeon with experience in the forensic assessment of injuries. The report addressed injuries to the Appellant’s ear and other scarring. Mr Sommerlad examined the Appellant and provided an expert opinion on the likely mechanism and consistency of the injuries with the history given by the Appellant. In particular, the report assessed the physical findings by reference to recognised medico-legal categories of consistency and concluded that the injury to the Appellant’s ear was diagnostic of a blow in which the ear had been struck against the head by an object sufficiently sharp to fracture the cartilage without producing a laceration of the skin.
31. The Judge accepted that the injury indicated a significant blow but suggested that similar injuries might occur accidentally, for example by “falling…onto a handrail” (paragraph [23]).
32. The difficulty with this reasoning is that the suggested alternative cause was not derived from the medical evidence itself and was not put to the Appellant during the hearing. While a tribunal is entitled to evaluate medical evidence in the context of the wider credibility assessment, it must avoid engaging in unsupported speculation as to alternative causes of injuries.
33. The reasoning in this case suggests that the Judge substituted his own speculative explanation for the expert medical findings without any evidential basis.
34. Given that the medical evidence formed part of the Appellant’s account of past harm, this approach undermines the adequacy of the Judge’s overall reasoning.
35. I therefore conclude that the Judge erred in law in the treatment of the medical evidence.
Ground 4
36. Ground 4 contends that the Judge failed to give adequate reasons for rejecting aspects of the Appellant’s evidence and failed properly to engage with material evidence, including the Appellant’s account that his mother and sister had informed him that members of the gang had attended the family home. It is submitted that this evidence was relevant to the assessment of whether there remained a continuing interest in the Appellant and therefore to the question of future risk on return.
37. The Judge did address the absence of corroborative evidence from family members and was entitled to take that matter into account when assessing the weight to be attached to the Appellant’s account.
38. Standing alone, this aspect of the reasoning would not disclose a material error of law. The absence of supporting evidence from family members was a matter which the Judge was entitled to consider in the overall credibility assessment.
39. However, the evaluation of future risk was closely connected to the Judge’s assessment of the expert and medical evidence. In circumstances where I have already concluded that the Judge erred in law in the treatment of that evidence, the assessment of continuing interest and risk on return cannot safely stand.
Conclusion
40. I find that the decision of the First-tier Tribunal involved the making of material errors of law in the evaluation of the country expert and medical evidence, as identified in Grounds 2 and 3.
41. Those errors materially undermine the Judge’s assessment of the Appellant’s credibility and the assessment of risk on return. The decision therefore cannot safely stand.
42. In light of the nature of the errors, the appropriate course is to set aside the decision and remit the appeal to the First-tier Tribunal for a fresh hearing before a different judge.

Notice of Decision
The decision of the First-tier Tribunal involved the making of a material error of law.
The decision of the First-tier Tribunal is set aside in its entirety with no findings preserved.
The appeal is remitted to the First-tier Tribunal to be heard de novo before a different judge.

S. Anzani

Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

11 March 2026