Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2026-001175
First-tier Tribunal No: PA/03676/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:
25th June 2026

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE KEBEDE

Between

BS
(Anonymity Order made)
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr M Malik, instructed by Hanson Law
For the Respondent: Mr M Diwnycz, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Manchester Civil Justice Centre on 16 June 2026

DECISION AND REASONS
1. The appellant is a citizen of Iran of Kurdish ethnicity born on 22 April 2006. He appeals, with permission, against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal dismissing his appeal against the respondent’s decision to refuse his asylum and human rights claims.
2. The appellant arrived in the UK on 12 June 2023 by boat from France, having left Iran in April 2023 and travelled through Turkey and Italy, and claimed asylum the following day. His claim was refused on 5 September 2024. He appealed against that decision and his appeal is the subject of these proceedings.
3. The appellant claimed to have been approached by some peshmergas in the mountains when he was working there, in April 2023, and to have been asked by them if he could lend them his horse until the following day. He gave them the horse and then returned home in the evening. He found out that the authorities had arrested one of the peshmergas after a fight broke out between the peshmergas and the Iranian authorities, and the peshmerga, when interrogated, had told them about the horse and had given the authorities his details. The authorities then came looking for him at the hospital where his father was receiving treatment for heart problems, and his uncle arranged for him to leave the country as it was not safe for him. The appellant claimed that he could not return to Iran because he would be seen by the authorities as having helped the peshmergas and his life would be at risk. He claimed to have become politically active via Facebook since coming to the UK and that that also placed him at risk upon return.
4. The respondent, in refusing the appellant’s claim, did not accept his account of his involvement with the peshmergas and did not accept that he would be at any risk on return to Iran.
5. The appellant appealed against the respondent’s decision. His appeal was heard in the First-tier Tribunal on 17 December 2025. He produced a bundle of documents for the appeal, including evidence of his Facebook activities as well as background country information about Iran. The appellant gave oral evidence before the Tribunal. The judge found the appellant’s evidence to be inconsistent and to lack credibility, and also found his account to be implausible. She found his evidence about his identity documents, as well as his evidence as to the identity of the men who approached him in the mountains, to be inconsistent, and she considered it implausible that the appellant would know what was said when the peshmerga was interrogated. The judge found the appellant’s evidence as to the timing of events to lack plausibility and also found it implausible that the Iranian authorities would choose to look for him at the hospital. As for the appellant’s evidence about his sur place activities, the judge did not accept that it was credible that the appellant, who claimed to be illiterate, would have been able to post on Facebook, and found his claim to have had no contact with his family to be inconsistent with his evidence in relation to his Facebook account. She found that the appellant’s sur place activities had been undertaken solely to bolster his claim and were not reflective of a genuine interest in politics. The judge concluded that the appellant would not be at risk on return to Iran. She accordingly dismissed the appeal.
6. The appellant sought permission to appeal against the judge’s decision on the following six grounds. Firstly, that the judge had erred in fact in relation to the appellant’s identity documents and his personal knowledge of the peshmergas. Secondly, that the judge had erred in considering the plausibility of the appellant’s account, contrary to the guidance in HK v SSHD [2006] EWCA Civ 1037. Thirdly, that the judge had erred by dismissing the appellant’s evidence as hearsay. Fourthly, that the judge had erred in relation to the approach to the appellant’s evidence about contact with his family. Fifthly, that the judge had erred by making assumptions and speculating about the appellant’s English language ability and other aspects of his evidence. Sixthly, that the judge had erred in her consideration of the appellant’s sur place activities.
7. Permission was granted by the First-tier Tribunal on all grounds, but primarily with regard to grounds four to six, as follows:
“2. It is arguable, as contended in grounds four and five, that the judge erred in entering into speculation in the findings about the appellant's contact with his family [36-38], in rejecting the appellant's evidence as to his acquisition of literacy [39-41] and as to what his social worker would have told him [43].
3. It is arguable, as contended in ground six, that the judge erred in making adverse findings about the appellant's sur place activities due to the absence of a third-party witness and in giving inadequate reasons for finding that the appellant's sur place activities are not genuine [44-45]. It is further arguable that the judge misapplied the case law in considering the appellant's Facebook activities.
4. Although I consider the other grounds less meritorious, permission to appeal is granted on all grounds…”
8. The respondent did not provide a rule 24 response.
9. The matter came before me for a hearing. I heard submissions from both parties.
10. Mr Malik addressed firstly the grounds said in the grant of permission to be the strongest. With regard to ground four and the judge’s findings on the appellant’s account of his reasons for a lack of family contact, he submitted that the judge had failed to consider and take into account background country evidence showing threats to family members. With regard to ground five, Mr Malik submitted that the judge had made assumptions and had irrationally rejected the appellant’s evidence about his literacy. The appellant had given evidence in his statement about having studied Englis and Maths, and using Facebook Translate, and the judge had failed to consider that. The judge also made assumptions about a conversation that should have happened between the appellant and his social worker, and made assumptions about the appellant’s father’s knowledge of the horse being given to the peshmergas. As for ground six, Mr Malik submitted that the judge had made errors in his findings on the appellant’s sur place activities by requiring third party witnesses, by requiring membership of anti-Iranian organisations, and by requiring regular Facebook posting, yet none of those were requirements in XX (PJAK, sur place activities, Facebook) Iran (CG) [2022] UKUT 23. Further, the judge had failed to consider other risk factors such as the risk arising from being a Kurd, from attending demonstrations and from evading military service, and had made a finding that the appellant had not come to the adverse attention of the authorities, which was contrary to the guidance in WAS (Pakistan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2023] EWCA Civ 894. As for the other grounds, Mr Malik submitted with regard to ground one that the judge made incorrect assumptions about the appellant’s evidence in relation to a lack of identification documents, and was wrong to find that the appellant had changed his evidence about knowing the peshmergas. With regard to ground two, Mr Malik submitted that the judge failed to follow the guidance in HK v SSHD [2006] EWCA Civ 1037 and erred by making findings on plausibility grounds, and irrational assumptions as to the conduct of the Iranian authorities. Finally, with regard to ground three, Mr Malim submitted that the judge wrongly dismissed the appellant’s evidence as hearsay, whereas hearsay was admissible evidence.
11. Mr Diwnycz accepted that there was an error in the judge’s assessment of the appellant’s literacy skills and his use of Facebook, but submitted that it was not necessarily material. He submitted that the other grounds were resisted but not with great strength.
Analysis
12. As a starting point I have to say that I was not assisted by the rather vague submissions made by Mr Diwnycz, from which it was difficult to ascertain his response to the appellant’s grounds. He conceded that the judge had erred in her approach to the appellant’s literacy and use of Facebook but he said that the error was not necessarily material, and he said that he was resisting the other grounds, but without making specific submissions on them. There was furthermore, and rather unhelpfully, no rule 24 reply from the respondent. There may have been more significance in Mr Diwnycz’s limited challenge had there been anything of merit in the grounds, but I cannot see that there is such merit. The grounds are, for the most part, a disagreement with the judge’s decision and an attempt to clarify the evidence and re-argue the appellant’s case. That is particularly the case with the first three grounds. Indeed, the grant of permission focussed primarily on the judge’s findings on the appellant’s sur place activities and the fourth to sixth grounds, rather than the adverse credibility findings made in relation to the claimed events in Iran.
13. The judge was evidently unimpressed with the appellant as a witness and she made a point of noting how his evidence had developed at the hearing when matters were put to him. That was particularly so with regard to his evidence about his identity documents and about the incident involving the peshmergas. The first ground criticises and categorises the judge’s findings on the issue of documentation and his meeting with peshmergas in the mountains as being based upon errors of fact. More specifically, Mr Malik submitted that the appellant’s evidence about his identity documents was simply clarification and it was not a matter of him “moving” his evidence, as the judge had found. He submitted that the judge was making an incorrect assumption. However the judge was perfectly entitled to consider the evidence as having developed at the time of the hearing and to treat that development as an inconsistency in the appellant’s account, leading to concerns as to the reliability of the evidence. Likewise, whilst Mr Malik submitted that the judge was wrong to find that the appellant’s evidence about the peshmergas was inconsistent and that he had always said, throughout his evidence at each stage of the process, that he had interacted with the peshmergas previously, the point the judge was making at [23] was that he had changed his evidence from the men not having identified themselves and him not knowing who they were, to the account at the hearing that he actually knew them. Again, that was an inconsistency in the evidence from which the judge was entitled to draw the adverse inference that she did. The assertions made in the grounds are simply an attempt to elaborate and clarify the evidence, but they do not show that the judge erred in her findings.
14. The second ground relies upon the case of HK in asserting that the judge, at [24] to [29], erred by making assumptions based on plausibility in her findings on the appellant’s account of the Iranian authorities going to the hospital where his father was and of his father being aware of the incident involving the horse. However the appellant’s reliance upon HK in this, and other, grounds is, in my view, misconceived and based upon a misunderstanding of the decision. The judge, in those paragraphs, gave clear and cogent reasons for concluding that the appellant was not a credible one, in light of inconsistencies in his evidence as well as concerns about the time-line of events. The judge explained at length how it was that the appellant’s account simply did not add up and lacked plausibility, not simply on the basis of unsupported and irrational assumptions, as the grounds suggest, but rather on the basis of common sense and justifiable concerns, taken in conjunction with discrepancies in the evidence. This was therefore a very different scenario to that in HK where the Court emphasised the unusual and exceptional nature of the facts of that case and said, at [48]:
“this is a very exceptional case, not merely in the unusual nature of the appellant's story, but also in the consistency of his evidence, the absence of any contradictory evidence, and the support from country and medical expert evidence"
15. As for the reliance on the admissibility of hearsay evidence in the third ground, that misses the point the judge was making, namely that the appellant was not present at the time the peshmerga was interrogated and was therefore unlikely to know the nature of the information given to the authorities. The fact that the CPIN confirmed incidents of torture and false confessions was not relevant to the point the judge was making.
16. There is accordingly, in my view, nothing of merit in the first three grounds. The judge was fully entitled to reject the appellant’s account of the events leading to him departing from Iran, and the risk on return arising in that regard, for the reasons properly given.
17. As already mentioned, the grant of permission was primarily made in regard to the fourth, fifth and sixth grounds which were essentially the judge’s findings on the appellant’s sur place activities. In those grounds it is asserted that the judge erred by entering into speculation and making assumptions in regard to the appellant's contact with his family, his acquisition of literacy, what his social worker would have told him, and what was involved in joining a Kurdish organisation, and that the judge erred by imposing certain evidential requirements upon the appellant.
18. Mr Diwnycz conceded that the judge may have erred in some of those respects, on the literacy issue and the appellant’s use of Facebook, but did not commit to whether the errors were material. I agree that the judge appears to have failed, when taking, at [41], a “cynical” approach to the appellant’s claim that he had acquired an ability to read and write in English, to engage with the evidence in his statement that he had been studying Maths and English at college. I also accept that, at [43], the judge could be said to have entered into the realms of speculation about what the appellant’s social worker would and would not have done/ assisted him with. I also accept that the judge’s findings on contact with his family were rather convoluted and unclear and could have been better expressed.
19. However the judge’s findings on those matters have to be considered in the context in which they were made. The judge’s findings at [43] in relation to the appellant’s contact with his social worker have to be considered in the context of the appellant having himself raised the issue of his social worker in his explanation for not having commenced his sur place activities until July 2025, a few months before his appeal hearing, as recorded at [42]. The findings made by the judge at [43] were her reasons for rejecting that explanation. The point that the judge was making at [43], albeit perhaps not expressed in the most succinct and clearest of ways, was that the appellant’s explanation, that he had not been given support by his social worker in that regard, was not a credible one. The judge’s reasons for so concluding were entirely reasonable and she was perfectly entitled to reject his explanation for the delay in involving himself in political activities and to draw the adverse inferences that she did from that delay. The same can be said of the findings on the appellant’s contact with his family at [36] to [38], in which the judge, in perhaps a rather convoluted way, found that the appellant’s asserted reasons for not having contact with his family were inconsistent with him having a public profile on Facebook, with the risks that that entailed.
20. Likewise, it is not the case that the judge imposed evidential requirements upon the appellant. The judge’s reference at [44] to there being no attendance by or statements from witnesses to support his claim as to how he become involved in political activities in the UK was not a matter of the judge imposing a requirement for witnesses, as the grounds suggest, but rather the judge was simply making the point that the appellant could have befitted from such supporting evidence, particularly in light of the other concerns. In the same vein, the judge was not imposing a requirement at [45] for the appellant to belong to a Kurdish organisation, as the grounds assert, but rather she was making the point that if he genuinely held an interest in Kurdish, anti-regime politics and if he considered himself to be politically active, it was surprising that he had not joined any of the Kurdish organisations in the UK. The judge was, in my view, perfectly entitled to find that the fact that the appellant had not done so reflected adversely on the genuineness of his intentions when attending demonstrations and posting on social media.
21. Accordingly I do not agree that the judge made speculative assumptions and imposed evidential requirements when assessing the genuineness of the appellant’s political activities in the UK. Rather, she gave detailed consideration to the appellant’s reasons for becoming politically involved, the timing of his involvement in activities and the nature of those activities and, having done so, she gave cogent reasons for concluding that his activities were not genuinely motivated. The judge’s concerns about the appellant’s level of literacy have to be considered in the context of her overall assessment and it cannot be said, in my view, that the judge materially erred in that assessment.
22. Having reached the conclusions that she did about the genuineness of the appellant’s political beliefs and having found the appellant’s activities to have been undertaken solely to bolster a weak asylum claim, the judge went on to apply the relevant country guidance in assessing the risk nevertheless arising on return to Iran as a result of that political activity. The judge was fully cognisant of the increased risk to Iranian Kurds, as referred to at [55], and accordingly considered the impact of the appellant’s Facebook activity and attendance at demonstrations in the context of that enhanced risk, in accordance with the guidance in XX, to which she referred at length from [48]. From [51] she gave specific consideration to the significance of the appellant’s social media activities when assessing risk and considered, in line with the guidance in XX, the option of deleting his Facebook account, concluding at [55] and [56] that that option was available to the appellant, owing to the nature and extent of his activities. At [68] and [69] the judge considered the appellant’s role in the demonstrations he had attended, in line with the relevant country guidance, and found that he would not be identified as a person of any interest and would therefore not be at risk on return to Iran on that basis. For the reasons fully and properly given the judge concluded that the appellant’s political activities in the UK would not put him at risk on return.
23. Mr Malik made a submission that the judge had failed to consider all risk factors taken together, in line with the guidance in XX. However I do not accept that that is the case. From [66] onwards the judge considered together the risk arising from the appellant’s Kurdish ethnicity, from his sur place political activities, from the claimed (but rejected) events in Iran and from his prior illegal exit from Iran. In so far as Mr Malik asserts that the judge erred by failing to consider the risk arising from the appellant’s failure to undertake military service in Iran, I do not accept that that was a matter upon which he relied before the First-tier Tribunal. Although it was mentioned in the skeleton argument ([48] and [49]) before the First-tier Tribunal, the judge’s decision at [9] suggests that the skeleton argument was not relied upon or at least not in full. I note that draft evasion was not listed as one of the issues at [11]. Further, whilst the appellant mentioned in his appeal statement that he had not served in the military, he did not make any claim to be at risk on that basis. Neither did he make such a claim in his asylum statement. There was, furthermore, no evidence before the judge to suggest that he was viewed as a draft evader. In addition no such claim was made in the grounds seeking permission. I therefore reject Mr Malik’s submission in that regard.
24. For all these reasons I do not accept that the judge made errors of law in her decision. Although I accept that the judge’s decision could arguably have benefited from being more structured and succinct, the judge nevertheless addressed all relevant matters and applied the relevant country guidance, and she provided full and cogent reasons for reaching the conclusions that she did. The decision she reached was fully and properly open to her on the evidence before her. Her decision is accordingly upheld.
Notice of Decision
25. The making of the decision of the First-tier Tribunal did not involve a material error on a point of law requiring it to be set aside. The decision to dismiss the appeal stands.

Anonymity Order
The Anonymity Order previously made is continued.

Signed: S Kebede
Upper Tribunal Judge Kebede

Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

19 June 2026