Ahmed v Secretary Of State For the Home Department

Persecution supports a refugee claim only where it is inflicted for a Convention reason. Serious mistreatment and a well-founded fear are insufficient without the required causal connection. A court may not interfere with factual findings by the Immigration Appeal Tribunal except on a point of law.

Discrimination by a private individual engages Convention rights through state responsibility only where the state itself discriminates or is unable or unwilling to protect the citizen from the private actor. Mere false information supplied to the police does not establish such responsibility without evidence of combined persecutory activity or state persecution.

The appellant, a Pakistani citizen, claimed asylum after alleging repeated detention and torture by police because of suspected involvement in the criminal activities of his brother and cousin, who were associated with an extremist Sunni movement. The Special Adjudicator accepted the torture and the well-founded fear of persecution but found that the police action was motivated by criminality and the desire for information, not by a Refugee Convention reason. The Immigration Appeal Tribunal dismissed his appeal. The central issues were causation, membership of a particular social group, and whether false information from a Shia informant engaged state responsibility.

1. Appeal dismissed. The three members of the court agreed that the appellant could not challenge the lower tribunals’ primary factual findings except on a point of law.
2. The Special Adjudicator and the Immigration Appeal Tribunal asked the correct question: why the police had detained and mistreated the appellant. The evidence supported the conclusion that the police were interested in the criminal activities of his brother and cousin, their whereabouts, weapons and possible involvement in killings. There was no evidence that the police were anti-Sunni, anti-SSP, or interested in the appellant’s religion or political opinion.
3. The accepted torture was deplorable, but it was not persecution for a Convention reason. The finding that the appellant feared future action by the police for the same criminal or evidential reasons was within the tribunal’s lawful evaluative discretion.
4. The proposed particular social group, namely the appellant’s family, was unsupported by evidence. Apart from the appellant, his brother and his cousin, no family member had been significantly ill-treated or harassed. The brother and cousin themselves were not shown to be at risk for a Convention reason.
5. Lord Justice Buxton rejected the further argument based on Ravichandaran [1996] Imm AR 97 at 109. Discrimination engages the Convention only where the state performs it, or where a non-state actor discriminates and the state is unable or unwilling to protect the citizen. There was no evidence that the Shia informant was a non-state agent for whose conduct Pakistan was responsible, or of combined persecutory activity by the informant and the police.
6. Lady Justice Arden added that the Article 3 issue was not before the court and expressed no view on whether removal would create a risk of treatment contrary to that Article. The appellant’s public-funded costs were assessed.

• Court of Appeal (Civil Division): appeal from the Immigration Appeal Tribunal dismissed.
• Immigration Appeal Tribunal: dismissed the appeal from the Special Adjudicator’s refusal of the asylum claim on 15 February 2000.
• Special Adjudicator: refused the asylum application on 28 September 1998, accepting the torture but finding no Convention reason for it.