Soytoprak v Secretary Of State For the Home Department

In assessing an asylum claim, a tribunal may attach substantial weight to serious omissions and inconsistencies in an applicant’s contemporaneous account. Once credibility is materially damaged, the tribunal may reject related allegations of past ill-treatment, provided its reasoning is apparent. Medical evidence showing that an injury is merely consistent with the alleged account does not establish its cause. Kurdish ethnicity alone does not create an automatic risk of persecution on return to Turkey. Where persecution is feared only in the applicant’s home area, internal relocation may be reasonable if the applicant has previously lived and worked elsewhere and there is no evidence that relocation with the family would cause undue hardship.

The applicant, a Kurdish national of Turkey, claimed asylum after alleging detention, torture and mistreatment by Turkish security forces and asserting that he had assisted PKK guerrillas under duress.

A special adjudicator rejected his account and concluded that he could reasonably relocate elsewhere in Turkey. The Immigration Appeal Tribunal admitted medical evidence but dismissed his appeal, finding serious inconsistencies between his original statement and later evidence. The applicant renewed his application for permission to appeal, alleging inadequate reasoning, irrational treatment of the medical evidence, misapplication of Turgut, and inadequate consideration of family relocation.

1. Application dismissed. Lord Justice Keene held that the Immigration Appeal Tribunal was entitled to rely on the applicant’s failure to mention, in a detailed contemporaneous statement, the alleged 1992 torture and a later detention and beating in Ankara. These were serious inconsistencies. The Tribunal could therefore conclude that the applicant had not established the alleged ill-treatment generally.
2. The special adjudicator had made findings on credibility, although she had given inadequate reasons for them. The reasons were sufficiently apparent from the evidence, and the Tribunal was entitled to uphold the conclusions.
3. The medical report established no more than that the scar was consistent with a burn. It did not address its cause or establish that it resulted from acid poured on the applicant eight years earlier. The Tribunal had properly considered and weighed that evidence.
4. Turgut [2000] Imm AR 206 established, on the evidence in that case, that Kurdish asylum seekers returned to Turkey were not automatically at risk of persecution. The Tribunal was entitled to apply that approach, there being no evidence that this applicant faced a greater risk.
5. Alternatively, even if the applicant had a well-founded fear in his home area, the Tribunal was entitled to find that he and his family could reasonably relocate elsewhere in Turkey. His previous successful work away from the village supported that conclusion, and there was no evidence that family relocation would cause undue hardship.
6. Lord Justice Thorpe agreed. The application for permission to appeal was dismissed, with detailed assessment of the applicant’s costs.

• Court of Appeal (Civil Division): The renewed application for permission to appeal from the Immigration Appeal Tribunal was dismissed.
• Immigration Appeal Tribunal: The Tribunal dismissed the appeal from the special adjudicator, while accepting that the original decision contained inadequate reasons on some matters.
• Special adjudicator: The asylum claim was rejected on credibility grounds and on the alternative basis that internal relocation in Turkey was reasonable.