Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2026-002685
First-tier Tribunal No: HU/60498/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

On 16th of October 2026

Before

DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE RAE-REEVES

Between

FAM (KUWAIT)
(ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr Ali
For the Respondent: Mr S Walker, Senior Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 15 October 2026

Order Regarding Anonymity

Pursuant to rule 14 of the Tribunal Procedure (Upper Tribunal) Rules 2008, the appellant and/or any member of his family 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 or members of his family. Failure to comply with this order could amount to a contempt of court.

DECISION AND REASONS
Anonymity Direction 
1. I have decided to make an anonymity direction because the importance of facilitating the discharge of the obligations of the United Kingdom under the Refugee Convention in the circumstances of this case outweighs the principle of open justice because of the potential risk to the appellant due to the refugee status of her sponsor. 
2. The appellant is a citizen of Kuwait and an undocumented Bidoon. She applied on 11 January 2024 for entry clearance to join her claimed spouse, who has refugee status in the United Kingdom. The respondent refused the application on 6 August 2024. Her appeal was heard at Manchester on 25 February 2026 and was dismissed by First-tier Tribunal Judge Persaud in a decision promulgated on 2 March 2026 (‘the Judge’).
3. The appellant sought permission to appeal. The central complaint was that the Judge had repeatedly relied on the absence of original documents, although the respondent had not raised that matter and the appellant had not been given an opportunity to produce the originals or explain their absence. Permission was granted by First-tier Tribunal Judge Lawrence on 21 May 2026 on all grounds.
The appeal before the First-tier Tribunal
4. The appellant’s case before the First-tier Tribunal was that she was the sponsor’s wife, that their relationship had existed before he left Kuwait and that it remained genuine and subsisting. She relied upon the marriage certificate, supporting letters, evidence of communications and money transfers, together with the oral evidence of the sponsor. The respondent’s position was that the appellant had not established either the claimed relationship or that she had formed part of the sponsor’s pre-flight family unit. In particular, reliance was placed upon the sponsor having identified a different woman as his wife during his asylum interviews and upon the absence of evidence demonstrating sustained communication between the appellant and sponsor before 2023.
The decision of the First-tier Tribunal
5. The Judge correctly directed herself that there was no mandatory documentary list and that the cultural context and the difficulties faced by undocumented Bidoons in obtaining documents had to be considered. She stated at [15] that she had considered all the documentary evidence, including the marriage documents, witness letters, DHL evidence, communication logs, money transfers and country material.
6. At [16], however, the Judge recorded that none of the originals had been produced. Although she said that originals were not essential, she returned to their absence at paragraph 22, finding that it significantly reduced the weight attributable to the wider documentary evidence. The absence of originals was again mentioned when the judge assessed the supporting letters and marriage certificate at [23], and at [25] she found that the sponsor’s lack of credibility, alongside the lack of originals for handwritten documents, critically undermined the appellant’s case.
7. The Judge also made adverse findings independent of the form of the documents. She described the sponsor as a very poor witness. The communication records began substantially later than the claimed resumption of contact, and no earlier records were produced from the sponsor’s telephone or from the friend through whom contact was said initially to have occurred.
8. Most significantly, the sponsor had identified “Malak Khalaf Al Anazi” as his wife in both his screening interview and substantive asylum interview, giving the same date of birth on each occasion. The Judge rejected his explanation that he had invented those details to protect the appellant. The Judge found no reliable evidence of cohabitation, a shared household or a joint domestic life before the sponsor left Kuwait.
Grounds of appeal
9. The first ground alleges procedural unfairness because the absence of originals was not raised by the respondent or by the judge at the hearing, and the appellant was therefore denied a fair opportunity to provide them.
10. The second ground submits that, having declined to find the marriage certificate false, the judge erred by failing to give it adequate weight. The third ground submits that the appellant’s identity evidence and witness statement were not properly considered. The grounds contend cumulatively that the adverse findings on the relationship and Article 8 cannot safely stand.
11. At the beginning of the hearing Mr Ali stated that his instructions were that the absence of original documents was raised at the First-tier Tribunal hearing for the first time but that there was nothing to suggest that the Respondent had sought an explanation for their absence. He did not identify any objection, application for an adjournment or further evidence which the appellant had sought to provide. He submitted that the reference at paragraph 16 to the absence of originals was not a mere slip but permeated the judge’s mindset and loomed large throughout the decision.
Legal principles
12. An error of law is material only if it was capable of making a difference to the outcome. The appellate tribunal must read the decision fairly and as a whole, without subjecting it to an unduly narrow textual analysis. As explained in R (Iran) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] EWCA Civ 982, the reasons must be sufficient to show why the losing party lost, but immaterial errors do not require a decision to be set aside [10].
13. Procedural fairness is fact-sensitive. A matter may properly arise for the first time during a hearing. Fairness requires that the affected party has a proper opportunity to respond by evidence, explanation, submissions or, where necessary, an application for an adjournment.
DISCUSSION
Ground 1: the absence of original documents
14. Mr Ali’s apparent concession materially affects the factual premise of Ground 1. On his account, the issue did not first emerge in the written decision. It was raised during the First-tier Tribunal hearing, when the appellant was represented and the sponsor was giving evidence. The appellant therefore had notice that the availability and evidential significance of the originals were in issue.
15. The fact that the point was raised for the first time at the hearing did not, without more, render the proceedings unfair. There is no evidence that the appellant’s representative objected, sought time to obtain instructions, asked to provide the originals after the hearing or applied for an adjournment. Nor has it been identified what explanation or additional evidence would have been provided. In those circumstances, I am not satisfied that the appellant was denied a fair opportunity to address the matter. Ground 1 is not made out as a procedural fairness challenge.
16. I accept Mr Ali’s submission that the references to originals cannot be characterised as a single verbal slip. The Judge referred to their absence at paragraphs 16, 22, 23 and 25. At paragraph 22 she stated that it significantly reduced the weight attributable to the wider documents and at paragraph 25 she included the lack of originals among the matters said critically to undermine the case. The issue therefore formed part of the reasoning.
17. That does not, without more, disclose an error of law. Originality may be relevant to provenance and weight, although it is not determinative of authenticity or truth. The Judge expressly recognised that originals were not essential, directed herself to consider the evidence in the round and acknowledged the evidential difficulties experienced by undocumented Bidoons. Read as a whole, the decision does not disclose the application of a rule that copies were inadmissible or inherently incapable of carrying weight.
18. If, contrary to that conclusion, the Judge attached excessive weight to the absence of originals, or failed sufficiently to make clear at the hearing the significance she might later attach to the point, I do not consider any error to be material. The question is whether there is a realistic possibility that the result would have been different had the Judge disregarded the absence of originals altogether and treated the copies as faithful copies of original documents. I find that there is no such possibility.
19. The Judge’s central adverse finding concerned the sponsor’s credibility. In his first screening interview on 10/03/2022 he affirmatively identified another woman as his wife and gave a date of birth (Bundle page 144, question 1.20). In his second detailed interview undertaken on 27/09/2023, some 18 months later, he again named the same woman as his wife and gave the identical date of birth (Bundle page 166, question 15). This was not a single omission or uncertain answer. The Judge gave sustainable reasons for rejecting the explanation that the details had been invented to protect the appellant, including their precision and repetition after the sponsor had obtained legal representation.
20. The communication evidence gave rise to a separate and substantial difficulty. The sponsor claimed that contact resumed approximately one month after his arrival in the United Kingdom, initially through a friend and later directly. The records did not cover that earlier period. No records were produced from the friend’s telephone, the friend did not attend, and the refusal decision had expressly identified the absence of pre-2023 communication evidence. The Judge was entitled to reject as improbable the sponsor’s explanation that he had not understood that earlier records were needed.
21. Production of originals could not have resolved either difficulty. An original marriage certificate might strengthen the evidence of the document’s provenance, but it would not explain the sponsor’s repeated identification of a different wife. Nor would it establish, without reliable supporting evidence, a shared household, membership of the pre-flight family unit or a genuine and subsisting relationship at the date of decision. Original supporting letters would not, merely by being originals, establish the truth of their contents, cure the absence of their authors for questioning or supply the missing communication records.
22. Accordingly, I do not consider that Ground 1 establishes procedural unfairness in light of the concession that the matter was raised at the hearing. Alternatively, any error in the weight attached to the absence of originals was immaterial because the determinative credibility findings were sustainable and independent of that issue.
Ground 2: the marriage certificate
23. The second ground contends that, having declined to find the marriage certificate false, the Judge was required to attach greater or determinative weight to it. A finding that a document has not been proved false is not equivalent to a positive finding that it is genuine, reliable and sufficient to establish every fact asserted through it. The burden remained on the appellant to establish the claimed relationship on the balance of probabilities.
24. The Judge did not disregard the certificate. She stated that it was not necessarily false but concluded that it could not carry determinative weight without reliable evidence anchoring and explaining it. That assessment was open to her when the certificate was considered alongside the sponsor’s lack of credibility, his identification of another woman as his wife and the deficient evidence of communication.
25. Even if treated as an authentic copy of an original, the certificate would not, without reliable supporting evidence, determine whether the couple lived together before the sponsor’s departure, whether the appellant formed part of his pre-flight family unit or whether the relationship remained genuine and subsisting. Ground 2 discloses no material error of law.
Ground 3: identity and written evidence
26. The Judge’s acceptance of the appellant’s identity and undocumented Bidoon status did not require acceptance of the claimed relationship. Those were distinct factual questions. There was no inconsistency in accepting the explanation for the absence of conventional identity documentation while rejecting the evidence that she was the sponsor’s genuine spouse and a member of his pre-flight family unit.
27. The Judge stated that she had considered both witness statements. Although a more detailed express analysis of the appellant’s statement would have been preferable, her statement did not resolve the sponsor’s repeated identification of another woman as his wife, supply the missing earlier communications or independently establish a shared household before his departure.
28. There is no requirement to refer expressly to every item of evidence where the reasons adequately explain why the losing party lost. There is no realistic possibility that a fuller recital of the appellant’s statement would have displaced the central findings. I find that Ground 3 discloses no material error of law.
Cumulative assessment
29. I have considered the grounds cumulatively. Mr Ali was correct that the absence of originals featured more than once in the decision. His submissions on that point did not engage with the independent force of the credibility findings. Once the issue of originals is removed entirely, the sponsor’s repeated identification of another wife, the rejection of his explanation, the missing earlier communications and the lack of reliable evidence of shared pre-flight family life remain.
30. Those findings were open to the Judge, were adequately reasoned and were sufficient to determine the appeal. The documentary evidence, even if treated as authentic copies of originals, did not compel a different conclusion. I therefore find no material error of law. The decision of the First-tier Tribunal shall stand.
Notice of Decision
31. The decision of the First-tier Tribunal did not involve the making of a material error of law.
32. The decision of the First-tier Tribunal dismissing the appeal therefore stands.

V Rae-Reeves

Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

15/10/2026