MM (Eritrea) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

On an appeal raising questions of law, an appellate court should not interfere with an immigration judge’s credibility findings unless the judge acted perversely or relied on matters unsupported by evidence. A tribunal may draw reasonable inferences from a claimant’s claimed circumstances, knowledge and conduct. An adverse credibility assessment is not invalid merely because particular findings are challenged, where it rests on the evidence viewed as a whole.

Ms MM, claiming to be an Eritrean citizen, appealed against the rejection of her asylum claim by Immigration Judge Holmes in December 2007. The claim was rejected principally because her account was found incredible.

The renewed application for permission to appeal challenged the judge’s assessment of her knowledge of married women’s exemption from conscription in Eritrea, her knowledge of Pentecostal beliefs, her use of false documents and her failure to claim asylum on arrival. The central issue was whether those criticisms disclosed an error of law rather than disagreement with factual findings.

1. Lord Justice Stanley Burnton treated the matter as a renewed application for permission to appeal. The proposed appeal concerned the legal adequacy of the Immigration Judge’s reasoning, but the assessment of credibility was essentially factual. The Court of Appeal could not interfere merely because it might have assessed the evidence differently. Intervention would require perversity or reliance on matters for which there was no evidence.

2. The inference that a person liable to conscription, particularly one unwillingly subject to it, would know of a relevant exemption was open to the Immigration Judge. The judge was therefore entitled to take the appellant’s claimed ignorance of the exemption for married women into account.

3. The judge was also entitled to regard the appellant’s remarkable ignorance of the core beliefs of the religion she claimed to have joined as damaging to her credibility. The credibility assessment did not rest solely on those matters.

4. The Immigration Judge was entitled to draw adverse inferences from the appellant’s arrival on false documents, her failure to produce travel documentation and her deceptive entry without claiming asylum. Those matters provided an additional evidential basis for rejecting her account.

5. The judge was entitled, on the appellant’s own case and the finding that married women were not liable to conscription, to reject the alleged risk on return. The disagreements raised matters of fact, not arguable errors of law. Permission to appeal was refused.

• Court of Appeal (Civil Division): In [2008] EWCA Civ 638, the court refused the renewed application for permission to appeal from the determination of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal.