Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2025-005490
First-tier Tribunal No: PA/51473/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:
On 15th April 2026

Before

DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE LAY

Between

CZJ
(Anonymity Order made)
Appellant
v

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation
For the Appellant: Mr L Wood, Immigration Advice Service
For the Respondent: Mr M Pugh, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 19 March 2026

Order Regarding Anonymity

Pursuant to rule 14 of the Tribunal Procedure (Upper Tribunal) Rules 2008, the anonymity of the Appellant is maintained.

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
1. The Appellant is from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). The Secretary of State refused his asylum and human rights claims in a decision dated 24 November 2023. An appeal against that decision was dismissed in a First-Tier Tribunal determination promulgated on 9 October 2025. First-tier Judge Trent did not accept the Appellant’s account of facing risk from a non-state actor (illicit drugs gang) who had already targeted his father (a senior member of the security services leading a crackdown on criminal groups). The FTJ further dismissed an Article 3 ECHR claim which was based on return without documentation.
2. Permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal was refused by FTJ Curtis on 14 November 2025. The Appellant renewed his application direct to the Upper Tribunal and permission was granted on all grounds by UTJ Sheridan in a decision sealed on 29 December 2025. The UTJ noted, inter alia, that it was arguable that the FTJ had “failed to consider whether the screening interview could be given more than very limited weight, having regard to the principles discussed in AN & FA (Children) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] EWCA Civ 1636”.
3. There was a 282-page Composite Bundle served. Bundle references in this determination are in the following format: [CB: XX]: [Composite Bundle: PDF page number]. There was a Rule 24 reply by the Respondent dated 6 January 2026.
The grounds of appeal
4. There were three renewed grounds of appeal [CB: 21-26], albeit the same essential arguments were originally compressed into two grounds of appeal. Ground 1 related to the FTJ’s purported failure to have regard to AN & FA and the principles established by that case, which is also cited in the Respondent’s own guidance document, “Children’s asylum claims”, Version 5.0, dated 17 December 2024. Fundamentally, one of the protections afforded to children in the asylum process is the highest degree of circumspection if it transpires that a child has been invited to proffer substantive reasons for their asylum claim in a first encounter with the authorities in the absence of a responsible adult or legal representation. The contents of any such “interview” or interaction, e.g. a purported inconsistency with a later account, may well still be “admissible” to the statutory tribunal but that is a distinct issue from whether it can properly be relied upon by the Home Office and/or whether anything more than very limited weight can be placed on it as part of the overall assessment of credibility by a Judge. This is over and above the usual caution to be applied to Screening Interviews for adults: JA (Afghanistan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2014] EWCA Civ 450.
5. Ground 2 argued that the FTJ had erred in his approach to the forgivable fallibility of memory when an adult is recalling something that happened to them when they were a child, citing the old authority of Kasolo.
6. Ground 3 argued that the FTJ had impermissibly leaned upon “inherent implausibility” in assessing whether a criminal group in IKR would have the capacity to target a senior figure in the security establishment.
7. Mr Wood, on behalf of the Appellant, acknowledged that the strand of argument in Ground 2 upon renewal was, as originally pleaded, better conceptualised as an issue subsumed within Ground 1.
Essential factual background
8. At the outset of the hearing, I laid out my understanding of the chronology and factual background, in so far as it was relevant to Ground 1. The parties did not demur. The Appellant entered the UK on 15 November 2021 [CB: 233] and claimed asylum aged 15 (5 days before his 16th birthday). An “Initial Contact and Asylum Registration Questionnaire” was conducted on 19 November 2021 [CB: 229]. In that contact of 19 November 2021, the Appellant was asked a question (4.1) about reasons for claiming asylum. The record states as follows:
“Ran away from the drug dealer because my father was an Senior officer (aqeed) for the Kurdish police force (asayish). His uniform had two stars which means colonel. He was working for the drug department of the security force. My father was shot. I had to leave the country because I was under threat and I was abducted. That happened to my father one day before Ramadan 2021. (Which was around 12 or 13th of April based on google). I fear if I go back to my home country something bad will happen to me. I fear the drug takers.”
9. At that stage the Appellant was claiming to be an adult, having given incorrect details upon arrival which he says the smuggler instructed him to provide. The Respondent therefore treated him as such during that initial contact in 2021. Subsequently – it is not entirely clear from the documentation when this happened nor was I assisted at the hearing as to the precise date – the Respondent was alerted to the reality that the Appellant was a child and the Respondent accepted this to be the case from at least 2023 onwards.
10. What we can see clearly from the bundles is that on 28 July 2022 the Appellant instructed his solicitor [CB: 239]. On 18 May 2023 a Statement of Evidence Form (SEF) for an Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Child (UASC) was completed [CB: 227]. On 20 October 2023 a substantive asylum interview was conducted [CB: 246]. On 20 November 2023, the Appellant turned 18. On 24 November 2023 the Respondent refused the asylum claim and the Appellant thereafter lodged a notice of appeal.
11. In the substantive asylum interview in May 2023, at Question 70 [CB: 264], the Appellant was asked when the problems with the gang had started and he is recorded to have replied “it started in September and it continued to October [2021]”.
12. In that interview it was not put to the Appellant that, on the face of the Initial Contact form from November 2021, the problems had started in April 2021.
13. In the refusal letter of 24 November 2023 [CB: 174ff] the discrepancy is not mentioned nor even indirectly relied upon.
14. Once the FTT appeal had been initiated, the Respondent’s Review dated 4 October 2024 outlined a number of reasons why the Secretary of State was maintaining its refusal but the April-September/October 2021 date issue was not one of them.
15. At the FTT appeal hearing on 9 October 2025, the Respondent was represented by a Home Office Presenting Officer. It is apparent from paragraph 24 of the determination that the Appellant was cross-examined on the purported discrepancy and the contents of the Screening Interview of 2021. The FTJ then proceeded to draw adverse conclusions on credibility flowing from this very issue.
16. I have laid out this chronology at some length in order to make as clear as possible the course of the asylum claim. In particular, as a preliminary analysis, it seemed to me that having (inadvertently at that stage, since she was reasonably treating the appellant as an adult in November 2021) asked for and elicited an answer at 4.1 of the Screening Interview, the Respondent then acknowledged that the asylum-seeker was in fact a child and thus in the substantive interview in 2023 and at all stages thereafter up to the day of the asylum appeal did not seek to place any reliance or importance on the answer given at 4.1. This was entirely consistent with the Respondent’s own guidance, which itself cites AN & FA (Children). Then, for the very first time, in the appeal hearing itself in October 2025, a Home Office Presenting Officer has both “spotted” the discrepancy in the papers and then sought to pursue it, without adverting to the Respondent’s silence on the issue from 2023 onwards. In turn, the First-tier Judge then feeds the discrepancy, and the Appellant’s response to it under cross-examination, into the credibility assessment. The issue under Ground 1 is whether the FTJ materially erred in law in his approach to the purported discrepancy, in light of the chronology, caselaw and guidance.
Submissions
17. Mr Wood reiterated that it was clear from the Appeal Skeleton Argument (ASA) dated 9 September 2024 [CB: 39] that the Appellant was specifically alerting the FTJ to “Home Office guidance on processing children’s asylum claims”, which is Version 5.0 of that applicable caseworker document. At the time of the asylum appeal hearing itself, and even at the post-ASA review stage, the Respondent was not seeking to rely upon any purported inconsistency arising from the 2021 record as such but the Appellant had nonetheless cited the guidance to emphasise the importance of the safeguards in place for UASCs more generally, particularly as the Respondent was raising other credibility issues in her refusal. It was therefore “on the table” in the appeal and the FTJ was obliged to have proper regard to it, not least once the Home Office position changed in the appeal hearing itself. In tandem, the determination under challenge does not show that the FTJ either understood or applied the ratio of AN & FA (Children) and the Respondent’s own acceptance of that ratio as reflected in her casework guidance.
18. Mr Wood also argued, consistent with the written pleading (at paragraphs 16 and 18), that the Secretary of State ought not to have relied on the issue at all in the FT hearing and that this constituted a procedural unfairness.
19. Mr Wood addressed me on Ground 2, which turned on the correct approach to evaluating credibility in the context of fallible memory and the FTJ’s reasoning at paragraph 24 of the determination. He acknowledged, however, that if Ground 1 was made out, then the Kasolo point was likely to be irrelevant; or, to put it another way, if the FTJ’s approach in paragraphs 23 and 24 was tainted by material error on the AN & FA (Children) argument, then the Kasolo strand was merely an additional buttress to the Appellant’s argument that the FTJ had gone astray in concluding, at paragraph 24, that “it makes no sense that he would be able to remember that detail [the date his father was shot] at the time of making his witness statement, but would no longer be able to remember it at the hearing”.
20. As to Ground 3, it was submitted that paragraph 26 of the determination, in which FTJ Trent concluded that “I agree with the [HOPO’s] submission that it is not credible that Asayish [security apparatus officials] would face such difficulties from a drug gang” was not founded in evidence but rather flowed from the FTJ’s own conception of what is inherently likely or unlikely in IKR. Mr Wood contended that, indeed, there was nothing in the country evidence which rendered the Appellant’s account implausible and there was, in turn, country evidence on corruption and institutional failings which would tend to support the account rather than undermine it.
21. In response, on behalf the Secretary of State, Mr Pugh argued that the Respondent cannot be criticised for having conducted the adult screening interview when, at the time, the Appellant had given a date of birth which made him an adult [CB: 239-240]. The interview thus legitimately formed part of the Home Office bundle at the appeal and was admissible evidence to which the Appellant had not objected.
22. Further, it was the Respondent’s position that the FTJ had regard to the fact that the Appellant was a child at various stages of the process and the issue of age “pervades the determination”. In any event, AN & FA (Children) (paragraphs 123 to 126) does not establish a “hard and fast rule” that previous discrepancies cannot be given weight.
23. Mr Pugh also relied upon Hima v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2024] EWCA Civ 680 in support of his contention that there was no procedural unfairness in circumstances in which the issue was plainly raised at the hearing and the Appellant, and his representative, had ample opportunity to respond.
24. In the Respondent’s Rule 24, it was submitted that “even if the Judge erred in placing reliance on the inconsistency between the screening interview and his later evidence, this is not material in light of the FTTJ’s findings on the core of the Appellant’s account.”
25. As to Ground 2, i.e. the Kasolo point, Mr Pugh argued that the FTJ had conducted a holistic evaluation of credibility and was clearly aware of the Appellant’s age. Moreover, Kasolo, on Mr Pugh’s reading, is “more about the caution to be applied when someone remembers something later rather than earlier, rather than, as in this case, someone claiming to remember something earlier and then forgetting”. Mr Pugh urged me to view paragraph 24 of the determination as the FTJ understanding and applying the relevant principles to the Appellant’s evidence, including the “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember” responses which caused the FTJ concern.
26. On Ground 3 Mr Pugh submitted that there was no country evidence provided of senior Iraqi Kurdish law enforcers or security service officials being targeted by drugs gangs. The FTJ was entitled to be sceptical about the account, provided clear reasons at paragraph 26 and further cited country evidence of the institutional power of the “Asayish”. This was not, therefore, an example of “inherent implausibility” in an evidential vacuum.
27. Finally, Mr Pugh submitted that paragraph 34 of the determination had found that there would be sufficiency of protection in IKR and therefore any error made as to risk would not be material to the outcome.
28. Mr Wood made brief submissions in reply to which I have had regard.
Conclusions
29. I stress that I am concerned primarily not with form but with substance. If an FTJ does not cite a particular case but nonetheless applies the right legal principles then the Upper Tribunal will not leap to criticise or find error. In parallel, just because a Judge does not mention a particular strand of evidence or one legal submission of many, it does not mean they have not considered it: Volpi & Anor v Volpi [2022] EWCA Civ 464.
30. It is my conclusion that FTJ Trent did not apply the safeguards demanded of him by the ratio of AN & FA (Children) and that this materially tainted the approach taken to the Appellant’s credibility. While Mr Pugh submitted that the FTJ could not be criticised for not explicitly mentioning a case that had not been cited to him or addressing an issue that had not been identified, I find that this was a set of circumstances in which it ought to have been obvious that a new issue was being relied upon by the Home Office mid-hearing after three years of silence. I do not accept that Hima assists the Secretary of State in these circumstances. Further, the principles in AN & FA (Children) are not an abstruse legal point or a strand of evidence buried in bundle which a party has failed to mention. This is not a scenario where it can be suggested that the FTJ ought not to be expected to deal with the issue: Lata (FtT: principal controversial issues) India [2023] UKUT 163 (IAC).
31. It is a striking feature of this Appellant’s case that it was the Home Office itself which – correctly, following both the caselaw and its own guidance – did not seek to rely upon the answer given at 4.1 of the adult Screening Interview once the Appellant had been accepted to be a UASC some time in 2022/23. The “discrepancy” over the attack on his father (April 2021 or September/October 2021) is not mentioned in the substantive asylum interview after the Appellant states at Question 70 that his problems started in September/October 2021, the refusal letter or the Respondent’s Review. It re-appears for the first time in the middle of the cross-examination of the Appellant in the FTT appeal hearing in 2025. This silence, followed by sudden reliance, may have occurred because the Home Office Presenting Officer did not appreciate why the issue had been “dropped” from 2022 onwards or was not aware of the caseworker guidance or AN & FA (Children). My task, either way, is to assess whether the response of FTJ Trent contained material legal error in not himself having regard to the principles embodied by the caselaw.
32. I find that, on the face of the determination, its reasoning and its analysis, there was no, or no adequate, consideration of AN & FA (Children). Had the FTJ grappled with the Respondent’s guidance, which was cited in the Appellant’s Skeleton Argument, he would have seen that there is a section on AN & FA (Children).
33. When the Secretary of State suddenly, for the first time, sought to rely on the purported discrepancy, it should have been manifestly obvious on the papers that this was a new development and one which called for attention to the guidelines and, in turn, to AN & FA (Children). This includes that it will be a relevant consideration whether the Home Office has put a discrepancy to the child in any subsequent interview so as to give them a fair opportunity to address it. That might mitigate any later unfairness in placing weight on anything stated in the first contact interview (although Lady Justice Black, at paragraph 117 of AN & FA (Children), was reluctant to place faith in this as a resolution to the problem). In this case, the Respondent did not question the Appellant at all on the date issue in the substantive interview despite the Appellant having given the date of September 2021 in his substantive interview (at Question 70) as compared to April 2021 in his first contact account; nor had the Respondent ever relied upon it as a relevant issue. This was, therefore, an example of a procedural history in which there had been no mitigation of the procedural issue between 2021 and 2025.
34. If the FTJ was aware of these basic components of AN & FA (Children), they are simply omitted from his determination. While the FTJ was aware that the Appellant was a child when he was first interviewed, nothing in the determination – explicitly or impliedly – notes that the issue that had been dropped for more than three years before the Home Office had suddenly revived it mid-hearing.
35. I agree with Mr Pugh that AN & FA (Children) does not mean that evidence will be “inadmissible” in the sense that the Appellant’s representatives have suggested. Rather, the pragmatic route taken by the Court of Appeal was to require judges to treat such evidence, if obtained improperly (even if inadvertently) from a child, with such extreme caution that it would be rare indeed for anything but the most minimal weight to be placed upon it.
36. It is worth citing what AN & FA (Children) says in three nuanced judgments, not least because it was unfortunately bypassed in this particular case. The Court ultimately agreed that the evidence obtained from a defective (albeit lawful) interview would not be inadmissible/excluded “in all circumstances” or, to put it another way, automatically. However, on a case-specific basis, the utmost caution needed to be applied.
37. Lady Justice Black, giving the lead judgment, stated as follows (my emphasis added in underlinings):
108. But if an interview is carried out without the independent support for the child that it is recognised he requires when his asylum claim is discussed (see, for example, paragraphs 352 and 352ZA of the Immigration Rules and the guidance in Processing Asylum Applications from Children), the child's asylum position must surely be protected by alternative means and it seems to me that the proper way to do this is by regulating the reliance that can be placed on asylum related material which emerges. This was the approach Mitting J took and to that extent I agree with him.
109. I have been troubled by whether the matter can be addressed, as Mitting J considered that it could, by adjusting the weight attributed to such material rather than by limiting its admissibility in the decision-making process.
110. The rules and guidance about the use of such material which we have considered in this case seem to me to be lacking in consistency.
111. The Secretary of State conceded in front of Mitting J that reliance could not be placed on answers given to asylum-related questions asked of FA after he had intimated his claim for asylum and has not sought to reopen that on appeal; the discussion which follows proceeds upon that basis.
112. The first point I would make is that the rules and guidance treat the question of the use of asylum related material differently depending on whether the child has claimed asylum at the time it emerges (I will refer to such a child hereafter as "the asylum seeking child") or not. I cannot see any logical justification for differentiating on this basis. To my mind, it involves a misplaced concentration on the position of the child as it unfolds rather than looking at the matter from the other end of the process, once all the material that is relevant to the asylum claim has been gathered together.
…
123. I return finally, therefore, to the essential question, what use can be made of asylum related material obtained without what I consider would be the appropriate safeguards?
…
125. My final conclusion is that Mitting J was right to say that the influence of such answers should be regulated by weight in the particular case rather than by any universal principle of admissibility. Not only does this properly reflect the limits to which I am prepared to push my doubts, it is also largely consistent (as Elias LJ points out) with the approach taken in section 78 of PACE which is to require a tailored decision as to admissibility in each case. However, I hope that any decision maker considering the issue of weight will have regard to what I perceive to be the shortcomings of the present policies, to the particular vulnerabilities of children in circumstances such as those of FA and AN, and to the real possibility that difficulties created by interviewing them without a responsible adult present cannot be cured by providing an opportunity for the child to explain his earlier answers either in the substantive interview or later in the process. As Mitting J said, it may be right in an individual case to attribute no weight at all to the material that emerged; in that event, the material should be treated as if it had been excluded from the start.
126. Where there has been a clear breach of the principles set out in the various provisions governing questioning about asylum to which I have referred earlier in this judgment, it ought at the very least to be exceedingly difficult to persuade the court to admit material that has been thereby obtained; some breaches will inevitably rule out reliance on the material as was the case with FA's answers following his indication that he was claiming asylum. But decision makers will have to be alert to the possible need to discard material even where matters have not gone that far.
38. In a concurring judgment Lord Justice Kay put it this way [at paragraph 184]:
“I agree that answers given at the outset do not attract a blanket prohibition on subsequent admissibility and that the issue is one of weight, which will require scrupulous assessment. As the preceding judgments reveal, once an application for asylum has been intimated – as it may be spontaneously – the applicant has the protection of paragraph 6.2 of Processing Asylum Applications from Children. This acknowledgement of the risk of the potential unreliability of answers given at that stage by an asylum seeking minor in the absence of a responsible adult or legal representative is a matter which ought properly to be taken into account when considering what weight, if any, should be accorded to the answers of a minor who has not yet claimed asylum.”
39. The most that can be said for the FT determination is that the FTJ has had regard, to some degree, to the Appellant’s “age and vulnerability” (paragraphs 18, 19 & 23 & 29) but paragraph 24 is precisely where you would expect the FTJ to deal with AN & FA (Children). Instead, the issue is couched as one in which “the margin of appreciation in this regard can only go so far”, followed by an account of the Appellant clamming up during oral cross-examination after the “inconsistency” had been put to him. The Appellant is said to have “sought to disavow this Screening Interview entirely” before providing a series of answers in which he answers “most questions with ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I can’t remember’”. The FTJ moves on to other matters at paragraph 25. Critically, there is no apparent awareness of the procedural and substantive misstep which has occurred.
40. Whether the source of the problem was the Home Office Presenting Officer or the Appellant’s representative failure to intervene is not a question on which I focus. My view is that the FTJ ought to have been alive to a basic issue and failed to be. This led to a material error in evaluating a central strand of evidence, namely the date of the claimed actions of the gang in 2021. This is all the more surprising given that, at paragraph 18, the FTJ purports to have had regard to the Respondent’s guidance, which includes AN & FA (Children). The FTJ has only, in the most general way, at paragraph 18 cited broader principles that decision-makers should apply when evaluating evidence from children. There is nothing on the particular circumstances to which AN & FA (Children) applies and which surely applied in this case owing to the status of an interview which contained an answer of considerable concern to the Judge.
41. There was, in short, no “scrupulous assessment” (to use the Court of Appeal’s phrase) of whether the answer given at the first contact interview on 19 November 2021 ought to be given weight in all the circumstances. Moreover, I am not satisfied that there was even an awareness of the “problem” posed by reliance on that interview and the answer at Section 4.1.
42. The FTJ identified other reasons for being sceptical of the Appellant’s account (summarised at paragraph 30) but I find that the error as to the adult first contact/screening in November 2021 and the purported discrepancy is material because proper regard to AN & FA (Children) is, at the very least, capable of having made a difference to the outcome of the FTJ’s credibility assessment overall.
43. I find that it taints all of the determination since the foundation stone of the reasoning in the particular determination is credibility of the Appellant’s account, albeit it must be allied in turn with country evidence and viewed holistically: KB & AH (credibility-structured approach: Pakistan) [2017] UKUT 491 (IAC).
44. In my view, in light of my findings on Ground 1, and the material error which flowed from that issue, Ground 2 is rendered otiose.
45. On Ground 3, I also find that the FTJ erred in his approach to the plausibility of whether or not a drugs gang in IKR would have the will to seek reprisals against an Asayish figure responsible for combatting them. As UTJ Sheridan commented in granting permission: “The reason given by the judge for reaching this finding is that the background evidence shows that Asayish is strong and efficient and has the full funding and backing of the government. That may well be the case, but arguably it does not follow from this that a drugs gang would not act violently against senior members of a governmental organisation investigating it. Arguably, given the frequency of drugs gangs acting violently against authorities in many parts of the world it is not inherently implausible that this would occur in the IKR”.
46. I find that the FTJ, to an impermissible degree, relied upon his own sense of what is inherently implausible and/or provided reasoning that was not rational. The reach and effectiveness of the security and police apparatus in IKR does not, as a matter of evidence or logic, mean that it is not reasonably likely that the Appellant’s father was shot by a gang and that, in turn, the Appellant himself would face risk.
47. In Y v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2006] EWCA Civ 1223 Keene LJ identified a critical principle when credibility is assessed in an asylum claim:
25 … “The fundamental one is that he should be cautious before finding an account to be inherently incredible, because there is a considerable risk that he will be over influenced by his own views on what is or is not plausible, and those views will have inevitably been influenced by his own background in this country and by the customs and ways of our own society. It is therefore important that he should seek to view an appellant's account of events, as Mr Singh rightly argues, in the context of conditions in the country from which the appellant comes. The dangers were well described in an article by Sir Thomas Bingham … from an article in Current Legal Problems …
‘An English judge may have, or think that he has, a shrewd idea of how a Lloyds Broker or a Bristol wholesaler, or a Norfolk farmer, might react in some situation which is canvassed in the course of a case but he may, and I think should, feel very much more uncertain about the reactions of a Nigerian merchant, or an Indian ships' engineer, or a Yugoslav banker. Or even, to take a more homely example, a Sikh shopkeeper trading in Bradford. No judge worth his salt could possibl[y] assume that men of different nationalities, educations, trades, experience, creeds and temperaments would act as he might think he would have done or even - which may be quite different - in accordance with his concept of what a reasonable man would have done.’”
48. This applies, equally, to unpredictable machinations and contestation between non-state actors and security forces. While the FTJ, at paragraphs 26 and 27, does refer to the Home Office’s Country Policy Information Note, the elements identified as to the Asayish’s institutional power do not provide an adequate basis for the very specific assumptions, indeed speculations, that the FTJ formulates about the claimed experience of the Appellant’s family. Moreover, at paragraph 27, the FTJ states that it had not been evidenced that corruption in IKR was so rampant as to “allow such organisations to target a senior Asayish agent or his family with impunity”. That, in itself, assumes that the non-state actor had acted or felt it was acting “with impunity” when it may indeed have viewed the action as a calculated risk worth taking, even one which would invite a state reaction.
49. In any event, the FTJ’s flawed approach, substantively and procedurally, to the core issue of the Appellant’s credibility (Ground 1) likewise taints the evaluation of the plausibility of the subjective account, including the claimed family history.
50. Finally, Mr Pugh argued that the FTJ’s “finding” on sufficiency of protection at paragraph 34, which has not been challenged, means that any error of law on risk is not material. I do not accept that submission. There is some suggestion by the FTJ that paragraph 34 is provided de bene esse. It is described as a “brief observation”. It is framed in the following terms: “If there remained a credible threat on return, the Appellant’s father and the Appellant himself could benefit from such protection”, adverting to the security provided to the Appellant’s father while he was hospitalised (which the FTJ is “accepting” only hypothetically). Even if I were to accept that this is a clear and fully reasoned “finding” on sufficiency of protection, it is - in part – grounded in the FTJ’s (adverse) assessment of the Appellant’s account of events in IKR, which I have found to be tainted by error of law. They are interrelated and cannot be artificially sundered.
Disposal
51. I invited, on a provisional basis, submissions from the representatives on whether the appeal should be retained in the Upper Tribunal or remitted to the First-tier Tribunal. Mr Wood’s position was that the appeal should be remitted. Mr Pugh submitted that the appeal should be retained in the Upper Tribunal.
52. I have had regard to Section 7 of the “Senior President’s Practice Statements of the Immigration and Asylum Chambers of the First-tier Tribunal and the Upper Tribunal” (SPT Ryder, 11 June 2018), Begum (Remaking or remittal) Bangladesh [2023] UKUT 46 (IAC) and AEB v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWCA Civ 1512. In my view, the species of error I have identified means that the Appellant was denied a fair hearing in the FTT on the first occasion and that is a relevant consideration when deciding upon remittal.
53. On balance, therefore, I remit this appeal to the First-tier Tribunal for a fresh hearing, with no preserved findings.

Notice of Decision
The decision of the First-tier Tribunal, which dismissed the appeal, is set aside and the appeal is remitted to the First-Tier Tribunal to be heard afresh.

Taimour Lay

Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

5 April 2026