Woman wins High Court challenge over refusal to grant her refugee status

A woman who worked as a member of the administrative staff of a deposed west African political leader has won her High Court challenge over a refusal to grant her refugee status.

Mr Justice David Keane directed a fresh hearing of the woman’s case by the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (Ipat), formerly the Refugee Appeals Tribunal (RAT).

The Ipat’s failure to address the specific case advanced by the woman, who is from the Republic of Guinea, was fatal to its decision because it failed the test of reasonableness, the judge said.

The woman came here in 2008, applied for refugee status and was refused.

After her appeal to the RAT was rejected in July 2016, she brought judicial review proceedings against its successor tribunal, the Ipat, the Minister for Justice and the State.

Quashing the Ipat decision, Mr Justice Keane said, in broad outline, the evidence she presented to the tribunal was she was related to a senior member of the Democratic Party of Guinea who was summarily executed following a military coup in 1984.

Although pregnant at this time, she was detained for two days during which period she was tortured, drugged and repeatedly raped before being released.

Confidential files

More than a decade later, she got a job as a secretary in a department of the Guinean National Assembly, the tribunal heard. She dealt with confidential files concerning the operations and budget of the assembly and was trusted in that role by the then-president of the assembly, El Hajj Aboubacar Somparé.

In 2008, Mr Somparé fled the country following another coup. He phoned the woman from his refuge in a foreign embassy and warned her the military were looking for her believing she had important and secret documents.

Mr Somparé arranged for a vehicle to take her to neighbouring Mali where a woman arranged flights and travel documents before she arrived in Dublin in December 2008.

A Refugee Applications Commissioner rejected her asylum application on grounds she had failed to establish her general credibility, particularly in relation to her secretarial role in the assembly, as well as other reasons.

In her appeal, the RAT found she had established general credibility, including about her work for the assembly and her heightened fear of gender-base violence given her 1980s experience.

However, it refused to grant her refugee status on the discrete issue of the necessity to establish a connection between the fear of persecution she claimed and her political opinion.

It said she later got a government job and there was no credible evidence that others in similar positions to her in 2008 were targeted, the tribunal said.

Mr Justice Keane said the principal difficulty with the tribunal’s analysis was it completely ignored her contention she was “uniquely situated and not similarly situated to other administrative staff in relation to Somparé”.

She had never suggested, in her evidence, other staff were in a similar situation to her and therefore at risk of being targeted, he said. She was entitled to a re-hearing of her appeal before a newly constituted Ipat, he said.