Secretary of State for the Home Department v IA (Pakistan)

Internal relocation requires an individual assessment of whether the claimant can live with sufficient, though not absolute, safety elsewhere in the country of origin. The comparison is between the claimant’s particular well-founded fear and the protection available in the proposed place of relocation. It is not a comparison of general risk levels between different places.

Rabwah is neither generically safe nor generically unsafe for Pakistani Ahmadis. Its majority Ahmadi population does not justify a presumption of safety because civic power and policing are not under Ahmadi control. The nature and influence of the persecutor, the claimant’s personal circumstances and the practical accessibility of Rabwah must be assessed case by case. Whether relocation would be unduly harsh arises only after sufficient safety has been established.

The Home Secretary appealed against an Asylum and Immigration Tribunal country guidance determination allowing the appeals of two Pakistani Ahmadis. Each had established a well-founded fear of religious persecution in his home area. The Tribunal found that neither could safely relocate to Rabwah, a town with a large Ahmadi majority.

The Home Secretary contended that the Tribunal had inadequately assessed Rabwah’s relative safety, failed to examine the geographical distribution of Ahmadis and insufficiently addressed whether relocation would be unduly harsh. She also argued that the determination’s language could improperly foreclose findings in future cases that an Ahmadi could safely relocate there.

The central issue was whether the Tribunal’s reasoning established an impermissible general rule that Rabwah was unsafe for Ahmadis, or instead required an individual assessment of safety in each case.

1. Appeal dismissed. The Tribunal’s determination, read fairly and as a whole, did not establish that Rabwah was unsafe for every Ahmadi. It established that Rabwah could not be presumed either safe or unsafe. The availability of internal relocation there remained a question of fact in each case.

2. The starting point was the claimant’s well-founded fear of persecution in the home area. The decision-maker must then ask whether another place in the country offers sufficient, although not absolute, safety and whether the claimant can move there without undue hardship. The safety inquiry compares the claimant’s particular fear with the protection available elsewhere. It does not compare the general incidence of harm in two locations. A unique or statistically unusual act of persecution can therefore support refugee status if the particular risk cannot be escaped by relocation.

3. The undue-harshness limb arises only if a sufficiently safe place of relocation has first been identified. The Tribunal therefore committed no error by giving that issue only rudimentary consideration after finding Rabwah insufficiently safe for the respondents.

4. Rabwah’s majority Ahmadi population might provide safety in numbers and informal community support. It did not establish effective protection. Ahmadis did not control the police, government or civic authorities, and the anti-Ahmadi organisation KN was active there. Newcomers might also encounter difficulties obtaining accommodation. The significance of those matters depended on the nature of the individual risk. A locally motivated persecutor might cease pursuit once the claimant departed, whereas an influential or institutional persecutor might follow the claimant to Rabwah.

5. The Tribunal’s headnote was ambiguous in describing Rabwah as no safe haven for “any Ahmadi”. Read with the reasoning, it meant that Rabwah was not necessarily a safe haven for every Ahmadi. The country guidance status should remain because the determination corrected earlier guidance founded on the faulty assumption that Ahmadis exercised governmental or civic control in Rabwah.

6. The clarified determination did not foreclose future findings that particular Ahmadis could relocate safely to Rabwah. Neither removal of its country guidance status nor remission to a freshly constituted tribunal was necessary.

1. Court of Appeal (Civil Division): The Home Secretary’s appeal was dismissed. The court clarified the meaning of the Tribunal’s headnote and upheld the country guidance determination.

2. Asylum and Immigration Tribunal: The Tribunal allowed the two respondents’ conjoined appeals because Rabwah was not a sufficiently safe place of internal relocation for either of them. It accorded its determination country guidance status.

3. Immigration judges: The respondents’ asylum appeals had previously been dismissed on the basis that each could safely relocate to Rabwah. One respondent’s case had also been remitted by consent for redetermination of safety and undue hardship in Rabwah.