MD (Judge’s knowledge; standard of English)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | C M G OCKELTON,DEPUTY PRESIDENT |
| Judgment Date | 12 March 2009 |
| Neutral Citation | [2009] UKAIT 13 |
| Court | Asylum and Immigration Tribunal |
| Date | 12 March 2009 |
[2009] UKAIT 13
ASYLUM AND IMMIGRATION TRIBUNAL
THE IMMIGRATION ACTS
Mr C M G Ockelton, Deputy President of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal
Senior Immigration Judge Grubb
MD (Judge's knowledge; standard of English) Pakistan
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1. An Immigration Judge who believes that, in dealing with other cases, he has developed a specialised familiarity with a particular sort of evidence, that causes him to reach an adverse view of the genuineness of evidence produced to him, ought not to act on that view without giving the parties an opportunity to deal with the point.
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2. An appellant may be able to make himself understood in written English statements produced in his own time without having the ability in English necessary to follow an advanced course dealing with abstract concepts.
The appellant, a national of Pakistan, appealed to the Tribunal against the decision of the Respondent Entry Clearance Officer on 25 September 2007 refusing him Entry Clearance as a student. An Immigration Judge dismissed the appeal. The appellant sought and obtained an order for reconsideration. Thus the matter comes before us.
The appellant is outside the United Kingdom and has no nominated representative in the United Kingdom. This appearing to us to be a suitable case in which to do so, we have exercised our discretion to determine this reconsideration without a hearing, as we are permitted to do by rule 15(2)(b) of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (Procedure) Rules 2005 (as amended).
The respondent stated that he refused the application because he was not satisfied that the appellant met the requirements of subparagraphs 57(ii) and (vii) of the Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules, HC 395. That is to say, he was not persuaded that the appellant was able and intended to follow his course, or (as he makes clear by the text of the notice of refusal) that there were sufficient funds available to the appellant to enable him to meet the costs of the course and his maintenance and accommodation during it.
In his determination dismissing the appeal the Immigration Judge begins by alleging that the application was refused because the appellant could not meet the ‘following requirements of paragraph 57’, and then sets out paragraph 57 in full. It is not clear how he reaches the view that the respondent thought that none of the requirements of para 57 were met, and it seems to us that that of itself would be sufficient to amount to a material error of law, in that it is extremely difficult to say that the Immigration Judge would himself necessarily have reached the view he did on the outcome of the appeal if he had appreciated the limited nature of the respondent's refusal.
The Immigration Judge continues his determination by deciding that the documentation produced by the appellant to support his case should be rejected for a number of reasons. The IELC diploma, said to attest the appellant's abilities in the English language, is, he says, ‘an obvious forgery’. He draws on his own knowledge and experience to make this judgment, stating that he has seen ‘very many genuine IELC certificates’, and that this one has ‘plainly been produced on a word processor’ and ‘is not in the usual form with the score achieved in the test’.
We are not in a position specifically to doubt what the Immigration Judge says about having seen many genuine IELC certificates, although bearing in mind that, as the certificate itself makes clear, the abbreviation stands for ‘Irich English Language Centre’, a private institution in Peshawar founded in 1998, his assertion may be regarded as implausible. What is clear, however, is that if the Immigration Judge thought he had the specialised knowledge necessary to detect forgeries of IELC certificates, he should have declared it to both parties before acting on it. Further, the respondent had cast no doubt on the genuineness of the certificate: and in those circumstances although the Immigration Judge was clearly entitled to raise the issue, he ought not to have determined it against the appellant without giving him an opportunity to deal with the point. Further again, there is no trace in the determination that in reaching his conclusion the Immigration Judge bore in mind that forgery in a civil case requires proof to a high standard, the burden of proof being on the party relying (or, in a case such as this, presumed to rely) on the allegation of forgery. His treatment of this document is a further clear error of law, possibly compounded by his confusion of this certificate with some other document of which he had indeed seen many examples.
The Immigration Judge went on to reject other documents because he thought they had been prepared on ‘the word-processor’ and others because they were self-serving or derived from members of the appellant's family. These were again...
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RA (Nigeria) v Secretary of State for the Home Department
...as wholly unexceptionable. This case seems to me to be very different from the leading case to which I was referred of MD (Judge's knowledge; standard of English) Pakistan [2009] UKAIT 00013, where the judge relied on his own knowledge of a very particular and specific item of evidence befo......
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Upper Tribunal (Immigration and asylum chamber), 2009-03-12, [2009] UKAIT 13 (MD (Judge's knowledge, standard of English))
...{ font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; so-language: ar-SA } MD (Judge’s knowledge; standard of English) Pakistan [2009] UKAIT 00013 ASYLUM AND IMMIGRATION TRIBUNAL THE IMMIGRATION ACTS No hearing Before: Mr C M G Ockelton, Deputy President of the Asylum and Immigration Tr......