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England and Wales High Court (Administrative Court) Decisions |
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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales High Court (Administrative Court) Decisions >> A & Anor, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2008] EWHC 1459 (Admin) (15 May 2008) URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2008/1459.html Cite as: [2008] EWHC 1459 (Admin) |
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QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
THE ADMINISTRATIVE COURT
Strand London WC2A 2LL |
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B e f o r e :
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THE QUEEN ON THE APPLICATION OF (1) A | ||
and | ||
(2)I | Claimants | |
v | ||
SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT | Defendant |
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WordWave International Limited
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190 Fleet Street London EC4A 2AG
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(Official Shorthand Writers to the Court)
Ms C Patry-Hoskins (instructed by the Treasury Solicitor) appeared on behalf of the Defendant
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Crown Copyright ©
"(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
(2) Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others."
"Whether any Article of the European Convention on Human Rights other than Article 3 could be engaged in relation to a removal of an individual from the United Kingdom where the anticipated treatment in the receiving state will be in breach of the requirements of the Convention, but such treatment does not meet the minimum requirements of Article 3 of the Convention."
Lord Bingham answered that question at paragraph 21 as follows:
"(21) . . . I consider that the only possible answer to the question posed at the outset of this opinion is 'Yes'. I have accepted the possibility of relying on Article 2 in paragraph (15) above. I have questioned in paragraph (16) whether a claim based on Article 4 alone might not succeed. The authority cited in paragraph (17) shows that the court has not excluded the possibility of relying on Article 6, and even Article 5, while fully recognising the great difficulty of doing so and the exceptional nature of such cases. I do not think, on authority briefly cited in paragraph (18) and more fully discussed in R (Razgar) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2004] UKHL 27, [2004] INLR 349, that reliance on Article 8 can be ruled out in principle. I find it hard to think that a person could successfully resist expulsion in reliance on Article 9 without being entitled either to asylum on the ground of a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of religion or personal opinion or to resist expulsion in reliance on Article 3. But I would not rule out such a possibility in principle unless the Strasbourg court has clearly done so, and I am not sure it has. It is unnecessary for present purposes to consider other Articles of the Convention . . . "
Lord Bingham dealt with the approach to be adopted in claims based on qualified rights further at paragraph 24:
"(24) . . . The correct approach in case cases involving qualified rights such as those under Articles 8 and 9 is in my opinion that indicated by the Immigration Appeal Tribunal (Mr C M G Ockelton, deputy president, Mr Allen and Mr Moulden) in Devaseelan v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2002] UK IAT 702, [2003] Imm AR 1 at (111) --
'The reason why flagrant denial or gross violation is to be taken into account is that it is only in such a case -- where the right will be completely denied or nullified in the destination country -- that it can be said that removal will breach the treaty obligations of the signatory state however those obligations might be interpreted or whatever might be said by or on behalf of the destination state.'"
"(50) It will be apparent from the review of Strasbourg jurisprudence that where other Articles [dealing with qualified rights] may become engaged, a high threshold test will always have to be satisfied. It will be necessary to establish at least a real risk of a flagrant violation of the very essence of the right before other Articles could become engaged."
Lord Carswell concluded at paragraph 67:
"(67) . . . Both Lord Bingham of Cornhill and Lord Steyn have set out reasons why in principle Articles 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 could be engaged in appropriate cases, and I respectfully agree with their reasons and conclusions. I am myself satisfied that a fair reading of the Strasbourg cases requires a national court to accept that these Articles could possibly be engaged and that the exception to the territoriality principle is not confined to Article 3. There does not appear to be any conceptual reason why Article 9 should not be capable in principle of engagement, although I find it difficult to envisage a case, bearing in mind the flagrancy principle to which I am about to refer, in which there could be a sufficient interference with the Article 9 rights which does not also come within the Article 3 exception. It may be for this reason that the European Court of Human Rights appeared in Razaghi v Sweden (unreported) 11th March 2003 to reject the possibility of engagement of Article 9, although, as Lord Bingham of Cornhill has pointed out, the basis of the court's ruling concerning Article 9 is not entirely clear. For present purposes I think it sufficient to say that I would not rule it out.
(68) The European Court of Human Rights has consistently stated that before any Article of the Convention other than Article 3 could be regarded as engaged, it would require an extremely serious breach of the provisions of that Article. In Soering v United Kingdom [1989] 11 EHRR 439 it is said at 479, paragraph 113 of its judgment:
'The court does not exclude that an issue might exceptionally be raised under Article 6 by an extradition decision in circumstances where the fugitive has suffered or risks suffering a flagrant denial of a fair trial in the requesting country.'
(69) The adjective 'flagrant' has been repeated in many statements where the court has kept open the possibility of engagement of Articles of the Convention other than Article 3, a number of which are enumerated in paragraph (24) of the opinion of Lord Bingham of Cornhill in the present appeal. The concept of a flagrant breach or violation may not always be easy for domestic courts to apply -- one is put in mind of the difficulties which they have had in applying that of gross negligence -- but it seems to me that it was well expressed by the Immigration Appeal Tribunal in Devaseelan v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2002] UKIAT 702, [2003] Im AR 1 at (111), when it applied the criterion that the right in question would be completely denied or nullified in the destination country. This would harmonise with the concept of a fundamental breach, with which courts in this jurisdiction are familiar.
(70) If it could be said that in principle Article 9 is capable of engagement, it does not seem to me that the case of either appellant comes within the possible parameters of a flagrant, gross or fundamental breach of that Article such as to amount to a denial or nullification of the rights conferred by it . . . "
"The court's case-law indeed underlines that freedom of thought, religion and conscience is one of the foundations of a democratic society and that manifesting one's religion, including seeking to convince one's neighbour, is an essential part of that freedom (Kokkinakis, paragraph 31). This is however first and foremost the standard applied within the Contracting States, which are committed to democratic ideals, the rule of law and human rights. The Contracting States nonetheless have obligations towards those from other jurisdictions, imposed variously under the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees and under the above-mentioned Articles 2 and 3 of the Convention. As a result, protection is offered to those who have a substantiated claim that they will either suffer persecution for, inter alia, religious or will be at real risk of death or serious ill-treatment, and possibly flagrant denial of a fair trial or arbitrary detention, because of their religious affiliation (as for any other reason). Where however an individual claims that on return to his own country he would be impeded in his religious worship in a manner which falls short of those proscribed levels, the court considers that very limited assistance, if any, can be derived from Article 9 by itself. Otherwise it would be imposing an obligation on Contracting States effectively to act as indirect guarantors of freedom of worship for the rest of the world. If, for example, a country outside the umbrella of the Convention were to ban a religion but not impose any measure of persecution, prosecution, deprivation of liberty or ill-treatment, the court doubts that the Convention could be interpreted as requiring a Contracting State to provide the adherents of that banned sect with the possibility of pursuing that religion freely and openly on their own territories. While the court would not rule out the possibility that the responsibility of the returning State might in exceptional circumstances be engaged under Article 9 of the Convention where the person concerned ran a real risk of flagrant violation of that Article in the receiving State, the court shares the view of the House of Lords in the Ullah case that it would be difficult to visualise a case in which a sufficiently flagrant violation of Article 9 would not also involve treatment in violation of Article 3 of the Convention.
In the present application the applicants have failed to make out a case of persecution on religious grounds or to substantiate that they were at risk of a violation of Articles 2 or 3. Neither applicant had herself been subject to any physical attack or prevented from adhering to her faith. Both have claimed to have received unpleasant telephone calls and to have felt at risk of attack. The essence of their case rests on the general situation in Pakistan where there have been, over the past few years, attacks on churches and Christians. The domestic authorities however gave weight to the fact that the Christian community in Pakistan was under no official bar and indeed had their own parliamentary representatives and that the Pakistani law enforcement and judicial bodies respectively were taking steps to protect churches and schools and to arrest, prosecute and punish those who carried out attacks.
The applicants have emphasised that the police themselves fear the Islamic extremists and that the authorities have failed in the past to protect Christian churches despite the presence of guards. Nonetheless it is not apparent that the authorities are incapable of taking, or are unwilling to take, appropriate action in respect of violence or threats of violence directed against Christian targets.
In those circumstances, the court finds that, even assuming that Article 9 of the Convention is in principle capable of being engaged in the circumstances of the expulsion of an individual by a Contracting State, the applicants have not shown that they are personally at such risk or are members of such a vulnerable or threatened group or in such a precarious position as Christians as might disclose any appearance of a flagrant violation of Article 9 of the Convention.
It follows that this complaint is manifestly ill-founded and must be rejected in accordance with Article 35, paragraphs 3 and 4 of the Convention."
"The fallacy underlying this approach is the assumption that the conduct of the applicant is uninfluenced by the conduct of the persecutor and that the relevant persecutory conduct is the harm that will be inflicted. In many -- perhaps the majority of -- cases, however, the applicant has acted in the way that he or she did only because of the threat of harm. In such cases, the well-founded fear of persecution held by the applicant is the fear that, unless that person acts to avoid the harmful conduct, he or she will suffer harm. It is the threat of serious harm with its menacing implications that constitutes the persecutory conduct. To determine the issue of real chance without determining whether the modified conduct was influenced by the threat of harm is to fail to consider that issue properly."
"(16) . . . It will have to address questions that were not considered on the last occasion, including the reason why the appellant opted for 'discretion' before his departure from Iran and, by implication, would do so again on return. It will have to ask itself whether 'discretion' is something that the appellant can reasonably be expected to tolerate, not only in the context of random sexual activity but in relation to 'matters following from, and relevant to, sexual identity' in the wider sense recognised by the High Court of Australia (see the judgment of Gummow and Hayne JJ at paragraph 83). This requires consideration of the fact that homosexuals living in a stable relationship will wish, as this appellant says, to live openly with each other and the 'discretion' which they may feel constrained to exercise as the price to pay for the avoidance of condign punishment will require suppression in respect of many aspects of life that 'related to or informed by their sexuality' (Ibid, paragraph 81). This is not simply generalisation; it is dealt with in the appellant's evidence.
(17) The Tribunal will also need to make careful findings about the consequences for the relationship between the appellant and his current partner if the appellant were to be returned to Iran but his partner were to remain in this country (his stated intention). There are unanswered questions about what effect this would have upon the future expression of the appellant's homosexuality in Iran. These are difficult and complex questions. Their resolution will have to await further reconsideration by the AIT."
Buxton LJ put it in the following words at paragraph 20:
"I would only venture to add one point. The question that will be before the AIT on remission will be whether the applicant could reasonably be expected to tolerate whatever circumstances are likely to arise were he to return to Iran. The applicant may have to abandon part of his sexual identity, as referred to in the judgment of Gummow and Hayne JJ in S, in circumstances where failure to do that exposes him to the extreme danger that is set out in the country guidance case of RN and BB. The Tribunal may wish to consider whether the combination of those two circumstances has an effect on their decision as to whether the applicant can be expected to tolerate the situation he may find himself in when he returns to Iran."