AA (Sudan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

A tribunal need not refer to every piece of evidence. However, it must engage with evidence that is important and central to an individual’s claimed risk. If such evidence is rejected, adequate reasons must be given. Country Guidance is authoritative only where the later appeal concerns the same guidance issue and depends on the same or similar evidence. It must still be applied to the individual facts. General guidance that a person is not at risk solely because of group identity does not determine whether additional personal features create a higher risk.

The appellant, a Sudanese national from Darfur, appealed against an Asylum and Immigration Tribunal decision promulgated on 17 July 2006. The tribunal accepted his credible history of persecution but concluded that he would not face Article 3 ill-treatment if returned to Khartoum.

The appellant argued that the tribunal had failed to address expert evidence that records of his detention and escape might increase his individual risk. The Secretary of State relied on later Country Guidance in HGMO v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2006] UKAIT 00062. The central issues were whether the tribunal had erred in law and whether the later guidance made remission pointless.

1. Appeal allowed and case remitted. The AIT’s decision was legally flawed because it failed to deal with material expert evidence concerning the appellant’s individual risk on return to Khartoum.
2. Lord Justice Keene held that a decision maker need not refer to every piece of evidence, but important evidence relied on as crucial to the outcome must be addressed. Mr Verney’s evidence that there would be a record of the appellant’s detention and escape was potentially significant. The AIT’s reference only to whether the senior police officer would remember the appellant suggested that it had overlooked that evidence. If the evidence was rejected, reasons were required. The tribunal’s silence constituted an error of law.
3. The distinction between internal relocation to Khartoum and return from the United Kingdom did not cure the omission. The AIT had expressly addressed the appellant’s risk on return to Khartoum, and its finding that he would be treated as any other black African returnee could not stand.
4. Country Guidance such as HGMO is authoritative where the later appeal concerns the same guidance issue and depends on the same or similar evidence. It must nevertheless be applied to the individual facts. HGMO addressed principally the general position of non-Arab Darfuris and did not address persons detained by the police in Khartoum who had escaped from detention. Those features potentially placed the appellant in a higher-risk category.
5. The unresolved individual-risk issue was for the AIT, not the Court of Appeal. The appeal was not bound to fail under HGMO. The case was remitted for reconsideration of the risk on return to Khartoum. Lady Justice Smith and Lord Justice May agreed.

• Court of Appeal (Civil Division): appeal from the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal’s second-stage reconsideration, promulgated on 17 July 2006, in [AIT No. AS/17389/2004]. The appeal was allowed and the case remitted for reconsideration of the individual risk on return to Khartoum.