Upper Tribunal (Immigration and asylum chamber), 2023-11-07, UI-2023-003474
| Appeal Number | UI-2023-003474 |
| Hearing Date | 16 October 2023 |
| Date | 07 November 2023 |
| Published date | 22 November 2023 |
| Status | Unreported |
| Court | Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) |
|
Case No: UI-2023-003474 |
|
First-tier Tribunal No: PA/52430/2022 |
|
IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER |
Case No: UI-2023-003474 |
|
|
First-tier Tribunal No: PA/52430/2022 |
THE IMMIGRATION ACTS
Decision & Reasons Issued:
On 7th of November 2023
Before
DEPUTY UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE SKINNER
Between
MRZ
(ANONYMITY ORDER MADE)
Appellant
and
SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent
Representation:
For the Appellant: Ms S Saifolahi, counsel, instructed by NMH Solicitors Ltd
For the Respondent: Ms S McKenize, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer
Heard at Field House on 16 October 2023
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
Introduction
-
The Appellant is a citizen of Iran. Shortly after his arrival in the UK in 2016 he claimed asylum on the basis of his claimed sexuality. That claim and his subsequent appeals failed on the basis that his claim to be gay was not credible.
-
He now seeks asylum (or other international protection) on the basis that he is at risk on return to Iran because he has converted to Christianity. That claim was rejected by the Respondent on 14 June 2022 and his appeal to the First-tier Tribunal (“the FTT”) was refused by First-tier Tribunal Judge Moffatt (“the Judge”) in a decision dated 27 February 2023 (“the FTT Decision”). The Appellant now appeals to this Tribunal against the FTT Decision with permission granted by FTT Judge Landes on 5 April 2023.
-
Given the nature of the claim, I have decided that it is appropriate to anonymise the Appellant’s identity notwithstanding the importance of the open justice principle. My anonymity order is set out above.
The FTT Decision
-
As already noted, the Judge rejected the Appellant’s claim to be at risk on return. Given the nature of the Grounds on which it is said that the Judge erred in coming to that conclusion, set out below, it is necessary to consider her reasoning in some detail. However, in broad terms the appeal was dismissed on the basis that, first, the Appellant was not credible and it was therefore not accepted that he was a Christian convert as claimed, and second, that his sur place activities, in particular the online activities in which the Appellant had engaged to try to show that he was a Christian convert would not put him at risk at what is described in the Country Guidance as the ‘pinch point’ of being interviewed immediately on return to Iran.
-
After having set out the nature of the parties’ respective cases, the legal framework and other introductory matters, the Judge, at para. 41 noted (uncontroversially) that the approach she had to take was, in accordance with PS (Christianity – risk) Iran CG [2020] UKUT 00046 (IAC), first, to decide whether it was reasonably likely that the Appellant was a Christian. At para. 43, she noted that the answer to this question turned on the Appellant’s credibility. The Judge considered the issue of the Appellant’s professed Christianity and credibility of his evidence at paras. 44-62.
-
At para. 44, the Judge noted the previous “very clear findings about the reliability of the appellant’s evidence” which had been “vague and unreliable”.
-
At para. 45, the Judge considered a text message purportedly received from the Appellant’s father threatening to kill him on return. She noted that there were no contextualising material to the copy of the original, it was not possible to say from which mobile number it was sent, which year it was sent or who owned the number from which it was sent. The Judge was accordingly unable to attach any weight to this document. There is no challenge to this.
-
At paras. 46-53, the Judge considered a blog on which the Appellant sought to rely. She noted the following features of the copy in the Respondent’s bundle:
-
the first monthly post appeared to have been in November 2019, the same month that the Appellant was baptised;
-
the posts were primarily religious images with slogans or phrases;
-
above many of the images the Appellant’s name and the date were shown with an option to leave a comment;
-
other than showing the Appellant as the poster, there was little to indicate that it was the Appellant who was the creator or editor of the blog;
-
later passages of text did not credit the author of the text at all;
-
the first post with a comment was made on 30 September 2021 headed “We are Iranian Christians”;
-
no individual was attributed as the author and no-one was identified as being an Iranian Christian; and,
-
of the posts in the Respondent’s bundle, only three had comments and the greatest number of comments was five.
-
At para. 48, it was noted that there was also a version of the blog contained in the Appellant’s bundle. Compared to the printout in the Respondent’s bundle, these were to a greater scale (i.e. larger) and appeared to show the whole of the page, they had a photo of the Appellant on the right-hand side of them, there were no translations of the posts; and the copies of the posts showed the “Blog Stats” (20,351 views). These blog stats did not appear in the copy in the Respondent’s bundle and on the copies in the Appellant’s bundle, there was no url shown or date of printing.
-
At para. 50 the Judge noted the Appellant’s oral evidence about the blog. She records the Appellant as having stated that he had 26,000 followers (though there was no dispute before me that in fact it had been said that he had 26,000 views). This, the Judge noted, did not accord with the documents in the bundle, given that the blog appeared to have had 20,351 views when looking at the copies in the bundle. She noted too that the same number of views appeared against all the individual posts for 11 January 2022, 11 July 2022, 22 June 2022, 20 December 2021 and 30 September 2021. She considered that from this it could be inferred either that the blog had not been viewed since 30 September 2021, or that over the lifetime of the blog since 2019, there had been a total of 20,351 views.
-
At para. 51, the Judge expressed concern that the printouts contained within the two separate bundles were not identical although they purport to demonstrate the same posts. The Judge then referred to the guidance given headnotes 7 and 8 in XX (PJAK – sur place activities – Facebook) Iran CG [2022] UKUT 00023 (IAC). For reference, these provide that:
“7) Social media evidence is often limited to production of printed photographs, without full disclosure in electronic format. Production of a small part of a Facebook or social media account, for example, photocopied photographs, may be of very limited evidential value in a protection claim, when such a wealth of wider information, including a person's locations of access to Facebook and full timeline of social media activities, readily available on the "Download Your Information" function of Facebook in a matter of moments, has not been disclosed.
8) It is easy for an apparent printout or electronic excerpt of an internet page to be manipulated by changing the page source data. For the same reason, where a decision maker does not have access to an actual account, purported printouts from such an account may also have very limited evidential value.”
-
At para.52, the Judge considered that the disparities between the two copies of the posts suggest that the weight to be attached to them as evidence of the Appellant’s conversion should be limited.
-
She then stated that, at best, the cumulative number of posts which had been engaged with since the blog’s inception suggested that the blog did not have the high profile which the Appellant suggested it did. Over the course of 3.5 years, the posts had been viewed no more than 21,000 times, if reliance was placed on the copies found in the Appellant’s bundle.
-
At para. 53, the Judge concluded by considering that she could not rely solely on the copies within the Appellant’s bundle in the absence of any evidence explaining why the printouts differ from one another whilst purporting to show the same thing.
At paras. 54-57 the Judge assessed the witness statements and oral evidence adduced. At para. 55, she considered that the statement of Mr Soleimanian was important because he was the person who was said to have brought the Appellant together with his mother. He had stated that he had met the Appellant in person for the first time in 2018, having known him for a period of time through on-line chat in a computer game. He stated that the Appellant told him that he was a Christian and that he attended church on a regular basis to pray, that the Appellant told him about this parents’ divorce and his...
To continue reading
Request your trial