Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2026-002973
First-tier Tribunal No: PA/58704/2023
LP/03403/2024

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

21st October 2026

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE NEVILLE

Between

BG
(ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mrs M Cleghorn, counsel
For the Respondent: Ms K Khan, Senior Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 20 October 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

1. In its decision of 31 December 2025, the First-tier Tribunal (“FtT”) dismissed the appellant’s protection appeal. The appellant’s Iranian nationality and Kurdish ethnicity were common ground between the parties. Having heard evidence, the FtT rejected the appellant’s account of having worked as a kolbar (smuggler) who was part of a convoy that was attacked at night by Pasdars (members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp) who were now looking for him.
2. Within his grounds of appeal, the appellant argues that the two reasons given by the FtT for rejecting the credibility of his account were inadequate. Those two reasons are contained in the following paragraph of the FtT’s decision:
8. However, when asked about his final trip, the Appellant told [the Secretary of State’s representative] Mr Holloway that he did not know how far the authorities were away when they began to shoot because it was “dark at night”. I have to say that I did not find it credible that the Pasdars would attempt to shoot at anyone in the darkness as it would be a pointless exercise. The Appellant also told Mr Holloway that he had on occasions, including this one, carried his Iranian identity document with him in a small bag containing food for the journey. Asked why by Mr Holloway, he said that he would not have done so had he known that he would encounter the authorities. I found it incredible that anyone engaged in illegal activities such as smuggling, particularly if they were carrying political materials for a party such as Komala, would risk being found in possession of their own identification documentation. It would lead the authorities immediately to him.
3. It appears to me that the FtT considered credibility with regard to all the evidence, so had a third reason, contained within its assessment of the appellant’s claims concerning his political activity since arriving in the UK:
10 … He acknowledged that he had not played any major role, and there was some accuracy to Mr Holloway’s description of him as being no more than a face in the crowd of anything between 100 and 400 people. However, the Appellant told me that the authorities were aware of these activities as they had visited his family in Iran and had asked about his whereabouts. It made no sense to me that they would do that if, as he also said, they had disclosed to the family that they knew he was in the UK and participating in demonstrations. … In some cases, families have been arrested and charged. Close family members such as spouses, children, parents, or siblings are more likely to be detained. Importantly in this appeal, the report indicates that, in some cases, the authorities have arrested additional family members for having contact with the politically active person outside the country. The CPIN goes on to state that families with a civil or politically active member outside of Iran are particularly closely monitored and pressured. There are examples of family members being arrested or threatened with death because one of their close relatives has engaged in extensive political or human rights activities abroad.
11. The Appellant did not suggest that anything had happened to his family in Iran due to his political activity in the UK, and so I am not persuaded that his evidence was consistent with the background evidence to that extent. Furthermore, I did not find it at all credible that he would place his family at risk by continuing to attend demonstrations in the UK if the authorities were aware of his activities and were visiting his family in Iran as regularly as he claimed. Once again, my rejection of this aspect of his account has a negative effect on his overall credibility and reliability as a witness.
Principles
4. The caution that applies to appellate interference in findings of fact has been repeatedly emphasised in the authorities, for example in Volpi v Volpi [2022] EWCA Civ 464 at [2]:
i) An appeal court should not interfere with the trial judge's conclusions on primary facts unless it is satisfied that he was plainly wrong.
ii) The adverb "plainly" does not refer to the degree of confidence felt by the appeal court that it would not have reached the same conclusion as the trial judge. It does not matter, with whatever degree of certainty, that the appeal court considers that it would have reached a different conclusion. What matters is whether the decision under appeal is one that no reasonable judge could have reached.
iii) An appeal court is bound, unless there is compelling reason to the contrary, to assume that the trial judge has taken the whole of the evidence into his consideration. The mere fact that a judge does not mention a specific piece of evidence does not mean that he overlooked it.
iv) The validity of the findings of fact made by a trial judge is not aptly tested by considering whether the judgment presents a balanced account of the evidence. The trial judge must of course consider all the material evidence (although it need not all be discussed in his judgment). The weight which he gives to it is however pre-eminently a matter for him.
v) An appeal court can therefore set aside a judgment on the basis that the judge failed to give the evidence a balanced consideration only if the judge's conclusion was rationally insupportable.
vi) Reasons for judgment will always be capable of having been better expressed. An appeal court should not subject a judgment to narrow textual analysis. Nor should it be picked over or construed as though it was a piece of legislation or a contract.
5. In this appeal, similar principles are provided by the Senior President’s Practice Direction: Reasons for decisions, including the following:
6. Providing adequate reasons does not usually require the First-tier Tribunal to identify all of the evidence relied upon in reaching its findings of fact, to elaborate at length its conclusions on any issue of law, or to express every step of its reasoning. The reasons provided for any decision should be proportionate, not only to the resources of the Tribunal, but to the significance and complexity of the issues that have to be decided. Reasons need refer only to the main issues and evidence in dispute, and explain how those issues essential to the Tribunal’s conclusion have been resolved.
[…]
8. Judges and members in the First-tier Tribunal should expect that the Upper Tribunal will approach its own decisions on appeal in accordance with the well settled principle that appellate tribunals exercise appropriate restraint when considering a challenge to a decision based on the adequacy of reasons. As the Court of Appeal has emphasised, a realistic and reasonably benevolent approach will be taken such that decisions under appeal will be read fairly and not hypercritically.
9. As an expert tribunal, the First-tier Tribunal will generally be taken to be aware of the relevant authorities within the jurisdiction being exercised, and to be applying those cases without the need to refer to them specifically, unless it is clear from the language of the decision that they have failed to do so. The Upper Tribunal will not readily assume that a tribunal has misdirected itself merely because every step in its reasoning is not fully set out in its decision. Thus, a challenge based on the adequacy of reasons should only succeed when the appellate body cannot understand the Tribunal’s thought process in making material findings.
6. In KB & AH (credibility-structured approach : Pakistan) [2017] UKUT 491 (IAC), plausibility was described as an adverse indicator of credibility which:
28. …although in itself valid, requires a certain degree of caution in its application. Thus in HK v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2006] EWCA Civ 1037 case at [28]-[30] Neuberger LJ stated:
"28. Further, in many asylum cases, some, even most, of the appellant's story may seem inherently unlikely but that does not mean that it is untrue. The ingredients of the story, and the story as a whole, have to be considered against the available country evidence and reliable expert evidence, and other familiar factors, such as consistency with what the appellant has said before, and with other factual evidence (where there is any).”
29. Inherent probability, which may be helpful in many domestic cases, can be a dangerous, even a wholly inappropriate, factor to rely on in some asylum cases. Much of the evidence will be referable to societies with customs and circumstances which are very different from those of which the members of the fact-finding tribunal have any (even second-hand) experience. Indeed, it is likely that the country which an asylum-seeker has left will be suffering from the sort of problems and dislocations with which the overwhelming majority of residents of this country will be wholly unfamiliar. The point is well made in Hathaway on Law of Refugee Status (1991) at page 81:
'In assessing the general human rights information, decision-makers must constantly be on guard to avoid implicitly recharacterizing the nature of the risk based on their own perceptions of reasonability."
30. Inherent improbability in the context of asylum cases was discussed at some length by Lord Brodie in Awala -v- Secretary of State [2005] CSOH 73. At paragraph 22, he pointed out that it was "not proper to reject an applicant's account merely on the basis that it is not credible or not plausible. To say that an applicant's account is not credible is to state a conclusion" (emphasis added). At paragraph 24, he said that rejection of a story on grounds of implausibility must be done "on reasonably drawn inferences and not simply on conjecture or speculation". He went on to emphasise, as did Pill LJ in Ghaisari, the entitlement of the fact-finder to rely "on his common sense and his ability, as a practical and informed person, to identify what is or is not plausible". However, he accepted that "there will be cases where actions which may appear implausible if judged by...Scottish standards, might be plausible when considered within the context of the applicant's social and cultural background".
29. Reflecting much the same caution, paragraph 5.6.4 of this Home Office Instruction invokes, inter alia, what was said in Y v Secretary of State [2006] EWCA Civ 1223:
"[I]n [ Y] the Court of Appeal stated that in regarding an account as incredible the decision-maker must take care not to do so merely because it would not be plausible if it had happened in the UK. Again, underlying factors may well lead to behaviour and responses on the part of the claimant which run counter to what would be expected."
30. The reference by Neuberger LJ at [28] of HK to the need to consider factors related to plausibility along with "other familiar factors... such as consistency" is also illustrative of the need to avoid basing credibility assessment on just one indicator. We would add that even when focusing just on plausibility, it is not a concept with clear edges. Not only may there be degrees of (im)plausibility, but sometimes an aspect of an account that may be implausible in one respect may be plausible in another.
7. In short, reliance on implausibility alone does not automatically render a credibility assessment unlawful, but care must be taken.
Consideration
8. In criticising the first reason given by the FtT, Mrs Cleghorn’s grounds read:
Obviously, Pasdars do not restrict their shooting to daylight hours. Many security services around the world, and including Pasdars, shoot during hours that are dark.
9. I agree. Not only was there no evidential basis for the FtT’s analysis, it further neglects that those shooting had set an ambush.
10. As to the second reason, it was (I am told by Mrs Cleghorn) canvassed at the hearing that failure to carry ID documents would also put the appellant at risk if he were stopped by the authorities at any other point. While this second reason is more logical than the first, I agree that in the absence of any consideration of the appellant’s explanation there was no rational basis upon which the FtT could put significant weight on this perceived implausibility.
11. Taking stock for a moment, and mindful of the principles set out above, neither adverse indicator identified by the FtT was, as expressed, rationally capable of carrying material weight against the appellant’s account.
12. I accept that the third reason was capable of weighing against the appellant’s credibility, but only to a limited extent. As set out in the evidence referenced by the FtT, not all family members are subjected to ill-treatment, and the fact that this had not happened to the appellant’s family was not conclusive. It was not an indicator that by itself could have justified rejecting the appellant’s credibility, and nor did the FtT treat it as such.
13. With two of the three reasons given by the FtT for rejecting the appellant’s account not having been properly open to it, its overall assessment is unsafe. The decision must be set aside. I indicated this outcome at the end of the hearing and the parties were agreed that the required fact-finding justifies remitting the appeal to the FtT for rehearing with no facts preserved.
14. Due to this being a protection claim and given that identification could put the appellant at risk, I continue the anonymity order made by the FtT.
Notice of Decision

(i) The decision of the First-tier Tribunal involved the making of an error of law and is set aside.
(ii) The case is remitted to a differently constituted First-tier Tribunal for re-hearing with no facts preserved.

J Neville
Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

20 October 2026