MH (Afghanistan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Justice Longmore,Lord Justice Moore-Bick,Lord Justice Ward |
| Judgment Date | 05 March 2009 |
| Neutral Citation | [2009] EWCA Civ 527 |
| Date | 05 March 2009 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Docket Number | Case No: C5/2008/0564 |
[2009] EWCA Civ 527
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE ASYLUM AND IMMIGRATION TRIBUNAL
Before: Lord Justice Ward
Lord Justice Longmore and
Lord Justice Moore-Bick
Case No: C5/2008/0564
[AIT No AA/00325/2008]
THE APPELLANT APPEARED IN PERSON, INTERPRETED BY MS N NAZEMI
Ms S Broadfoot (instructed by Treasury Solicitors) appeared on behalf of the Respondent.
(As Approved By Court)
Lord Justice Longmore:
This applicant who applies for permission to appeal (and to whom I will refer as “MH”) was born on 30 January 1986 and is a citizen of Afghanistan. He has four siblings, one of whom, a sister, was granted indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom on 23 April 2006. He is married with two children. On 16 May 2005 an Italian worker in Kabul, Clementina Cantoni, was kidnapped by non-state agents there. At the time the applicant says that he ran a grocery shop in Kabul and that he was told by a neighbouring shop owner of the identity of one of the persons involved in the kidnapping. That information the applicant then says he passed on to a man named Sabour, a police investigation officer. The applicant claims that he left Afghanistan in late September or early October 2005 following the arrest of the persons responsibility for the kidnapping and fearing repercussions from associates of those persons. The applicant claims he spent about one year working illegally in a factory in Iran. He says he then travelled to Europe seeking asylum and he got as far as Greece, where the authorities apparently sent him back to Turkey. There is no dispute that he was fingerprinted in Mytilini in Greece and that that fingerprinting was recorded on 6 November 2006 and was later revealed to authorities here by what is called the Eurodac database.
He claims that he was deported to Turkey, from where he then returned to Iran. The Secretary of State has always asserted that on 5 December 2006 an individual using the name of Mustapha Rezven, and claiming to be an Iranian national, was fingerprinted at the immigration controls in Calais by an assistant immigration officer named Deborah Matthews, now married and known as Deborah Steele. These fingerprints were recorded on the immigration fingerprint bureau data base under reference IFBO6/069226/R. It is not disputed that the fingerprints appearing on that document match those taken from the applicant when he claimed asylum in the United Kingdom on 4 January 2008. He arrived in the United Kingdom on 27 December 2007, having on his case travelled from Iran via Turkey, first by ship and then by lorry. He claimed asylum in Liverpool on 4 January and was fingerprinted there on that day.
The applicant was refused asylum by the Secretary of State in a letter of a week later, 11 January. That stated that the information he had given about his journey from Afghanistan, while it did not go to the core of his claim, was deliberately misleading, especially since he had failed to mention in interview twice that he had claimed asylum in Greece. That was said to show a propensity to mislead the authorities in the United Kingdom and damaged his credibility about the details of the kidnap in relation to the Italian hostage. The applicant appealed, but on 23 January 2008 his appeal was dismissed by Immigration Judge Lawrence, who relied on what I may call the Calais fingerprint evidence, which had only been served by the Secretary of State 15 minutes before the hearing began, to conclude that the applicant had been in France on 5 December 2006, although the applicant had said that he did not know if he had ever been in France. On 29 January Senior Immigration Judge Perkins ordered reconsideration of that decision because in his view the applicant had not had a proper opportunity to consider the fingerprint evidence, and on 4 February 2008 Senior Immigration Judge Southern decided that, since the fingerprint evidence was essential to credibility, there had to be a completely fresh hearing. That took place on 20 February 2008 before Immigration Judge Neyman, and he made the following findings: firstly, the overwhelming evidence (ie the evidence of the Home Office fingerprint expert and of the applicant's own fingerprint expert) before him was that the man who called himself Mustapha Rezven and who had his fingerprints taken in Calais on 5 December 2006 and the appellant who had his fingerprints taken in this country in 2008 were one and the same person. That comes from paragraph 9(d).
Secondly, he found that the...
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