Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Cases Nos: UI-2026-002724
(PA/71814/2024)

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

28th August 2026

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE BRUCE

Between

DA
(anonymity order made)
Appellants
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:

For the Appellant: no appearance
For the Respondent: Mr Terrell, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on the 17 August 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 or any other member of his family likely to lead members of the public to identify them. Failure to comply with this order could amount to a contempt of court.

DECISION AND REASONS
1. The Appellant is a national of Afghanistan born in 1984. He appeals with permission against the decision of the First-tier Tribunal to dismiss his appeal on protection and human rights grounds.
2. I have made an order for anonymity in this ongoing protection claim, because at this stage I am satisfied that the public interest in maintaining the integrity of the refugee protection framework outweighs the presumption in favour of open justice.
3. On the morning of the hearing, there was no appearance by the Appellant, or his appointed representatives, Gromyko Amedu Solicitors. I checked that notices of hearing had been sent out. They were delivered by email to the solicitors on the 20 July 2026, and by post to the Appellant at an address in Peckham. I put the matter to the end of my list, whilst my clerk attempted to contact the solicitors by telephone. At approximately 10.30am she spoke with someone who said that they would check on the position and get back to her. No one called her back. Two subsequent calls to the solicitors went unanswered. At 1.09pm I emailed the solicitors, having checked that the email on the system was that given in the application for permission to appeal. I received no response.
4. At 2.10 the matter was called on. Mr Terrell checked the Home Office records and informed me that the Appellant was living, as of the 27 June, at an address in Gloucester: it would therefore appear that the Tribunal had sent the notices of hearing to the wrong address. There was however no indication on the Tribunal file that the Appellant had informed the Tribunal about his change of address. Nor was there any explanation for the absence of the representatives.
5. Mr Terrell urged me to proceed with the matter in the absence of the Appellant. He submitted that any further delay in the resolution of the appeal would be contrary to the interests of justice.
6. I decided to proceed with the hearing. It is the responsibility of the parties to keep the Tribunal informed about any change of address, and I had no explanation at all as to why the solicitors did not come to court. I was satisfied that there had been good service of the notice of hearing. Having had regard to the overriding objective I determined that any delay would not be in the interests of justice.
7. I heard brief submissions from Mr Terrell and had regard to the Home Office ‘rule 24’ reply, the First-tier Tribunal decision, the grounds of appeal and the decision to grant permission. I have decided that the grounds are not made out and that the appeal must be dismissed.
The Appellant’s Case
8. The factual basis of this claim may be shortly stated. The Appellant claims that in April 2020 he was working as a taxi driver in Kabul when his vehicle was commandeered by several members of the Taliban who ordered him to drive to an army checkpoint, whereupon they engaged in a firefight with the soldiers stationed there. The Appellant claims that he fled the scene, leaving his identity documents in the car. The army then started looking for him, believing him to be involved in the attack. The Appellant further asserts that the Taliban made it known that he was also wanted by them, as they suspected him of having given information to the (then) Afghan authorities about the identity of the people involved. The Appellant claims that one of the attackers has subsequently been killed and that the Taliban have issued warnings/court summonses indicating that they believe him to have somehow been involved.
9. The Respondent refused the claim, finding the Appellant’s evidence to lack credibility. In its decision dated 12 March 2026 the First-tier Tribunal agreed and dismissed the appeal. The Appellant now has permission to appeal, in limited terms, against that decision on the grounds that the Tribunal erred in law in:
(i) Requiring the Appellant to provide external corroboration of his account contrary to established principles of refugee law;
(ii) Drawing adverse inference from its own assessment of plausibility, without having regard to the cultural context in which the alleged events occurred.
Discussion and Findings
10. At its paragraph the Tribunal’s decision says this:
“To support his claim that the Taliban have an ongoing interest in him, the appellant has produced what he calls warning letters from the Taliban, to which I shall refer shortly. However, it is significant that the appellant was unable to produce any evidence as to how these letters reached him. His claim was that because of Taliban pursuit of him, his family had to leave home a few months after he left his home country, yet remarkably the letters seemed not only to have reached his friend but have also made their way to this country. The appellant claimed that the letters came by email and WhatsApp. It would have been very easy for him to have produced those. He has not done so, which undermines their reliability. I now turn to the letters themselves…”
11. Ground (i) alludes to the long-standing principle of refugee law that owing to the difficult circumstances in which they are likely to have fled their countries of origin, refugees should not be expected to produce corroborative evidence regarding particular aspects of their claim. I am asked to find that the First-tier Tribunal erred in doing so here.
12. In response the Secretary of State asks me to find that the evidence in question, whatsapp messages and emails to the Appellant in the UK, fall within that species of evidence discussed in ST (Corroboration - Kasolo) Ethiopia [2004] UKIAT 00119 15. In that case the Upper Tribunal held that the principle that corroboration is not generally required does not mean that the Tribunal is required to leave out of account the absence of documentary evidence which might reasonably be expected to have been produced.
13. I agree that the whatsapp messages and email allegedly sent to the Appellant, to which the threatening letters allegedly from the Taliban were attached, could quite easily have been produced in evidence. The Tribunal was therefore entitled, when conducting its holistic Tanveer Ahmed assessment of the documents, to draw adverse inference from its absence.
14. In ground (ii) it is submitted on behalf of the Appellant that the Tribunal violated another well-known principle in refugee law that plausibility should be judged in light of the country background evidence regarding the country in question, rather than the life experiences of an individual judge sitting in England. One passage in the Tribunal’s decision that might be so impugned comes at paragraph 37:
“By far, the most significant point is that the Taliban could not have had a way of identifying him in order to send him the letter of threat two days after the incident, which he claimed took place on 5 April 2020. His identity card was left in the taxi, which was seized by the army. The appellant said that the Taliban would have been able to find him through using their spies and other taxi drivers. That does not sound plausible at all. There must be hundreds of taxi drivers operating in Kabul. In the short time the appellant was with the Taliban and the chaos that must have followed later during the shoot-out, it is difficult to imagine how the three surviving Taliban members would have recorded sufficient detail to be able to trace the appellant”.
15. The Tribunal further says, of the text of one of the threatening letters produced by the Appellant:
“...it is unusual to say the least, that the appellant would have been accused of being involved in the death of their men and yet simply invite the appellant to present himself to them. The letter itself gives no address where he must make himself present and appears to have been issued by the Taliban's Directorate of Intelligence. No evidence was given as to whether the Taliban could have an intelligence directorate in 2020, given that they were no more than a shadow force then. It is also unimaginable that in a written document the appellant would be threatened to be executed. If such was the appellant's destiny, then it makes no sense why the Taliban could not have simply come looking for him in person”.
16. In the absence of the Appellant’s representatives I have given careful consideration to whether the Tribunal took an impermissible approach to plausibility. I have considered whether it unfairly supplanted a rounded view of the evidence with its own, perhaps UK-centric, view of how the Taliban might best prosecute an investigation into a suspected informant. I have also borne in mind, although it is not pleaded, that the Taliban’s practice of sending threatening ‘night letters’ to their perceived enemies is a matter within the knowledge of this specialist Tribunal.
17. I am however unable to find any error in the approach taken by the First-tier Tribunal here. First, the commentary about plausibility is in my view reasonable. It is inherently implausible that the Appellant – an anonymous Kabul taxi driver picked at random one day – could be identified by name and address just two days later. Second, these passages must be read in the context of the Tribunal’s reasoning overall. The appeal was not dismissed because the judge did not believe that the Taliban would act in a certain way. It was dismissed because the judge identified several significant discrepancies in the account which led it to the conclusion that the Appellant’s evidence could not be relied upon.
18. Reading the decision as a whole I am satisfied that the Tribunal did not err in law and that the decision to dismiss the appeal must be upheld.
Decisions
19. The appeal is dismissed.
20. There is an order for anonymity.

Upper Tribunal Judge Bruce
Immigration and Asylum Chamber
17th August 2026