AGIK v Secretary of State for the Home Department: asylum appeal dismissed over credibility findings

A First-tier Tribunal has dismissed an Afghan national's protection appeal, finding that although several of the Home Office's credibility concerns were unwarranted, other inconsistencies in his account could not be reconciled and were sufficient to undermine his claim.

The appellant, referred to as AGIK under an anonymity order, is a Pashtun shepherd from Laghman Province who is illiterate and never attended school. He claimed that his father had served as a checkpoint commander with the Arbaki, a local security force aligned with the former Afghan government, and that he himself had passed information about Taliban movements to his father from around the age of 15. He said this brought him to the Taliban's adverse attention, resulting in a brief detention, warning letters and telephone threats. His brother, he said, was killed by the Taliban before the group's 2021 takeover. He left Afghanistan that year, travelling through several European countries before reaching the United Kingdom.

The Secretary of State accepted AGIK's nationality and did not dispute that the Taliban would be the relevant actor of persecution if the core account were true. However, the respondent rejected the substance of the claim, pointing to inconsistencies regarding his father's role, the alleged threats, and the circumstances of his brother's death, and relied on section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 given his failure to claim asylum in transit countries.

Sitting at Birmingham, First-tier Tribunal Judge S. Aziz applied the two-stage test set out in section 32 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, as clarified in JCK (s.32 NABA 2022) Botswana [2024] UKUT 00100. The judge made allowance for AGIK's age at the time of the relevant events, his lack of education and his evident nervousness, and on that basis placed little weight on several of the respondent's objections, including his inability to give precise dates.

The determinative issue concerned how the Taliban allegedly discovered that AGIK was passing information to his father. His account shifted materially between interview and oral evidence. He initially said Taliban members had caught him sending text messages, before correcting this to voice messages once his illiteracy was raised. In cross-examination he changed his account further, asserting that local informants, not Taliban members themselves, had overheard him and reported him, and that these individuals later confessed their role to him directly.

The judge found this explanation inherently implausible, reasoning that covert informants would be unlikely to disclose their activities to the very person under surveillance, particularly given that AGIK's father held a position actively working against Taliban insurgency at the time. The judgement also identified a separate, unresolved conflict between AGIK's interview evidence, which repeatedly described direct encounters with Taliban members, and his oral evidence, in which he maintained he had never had face-to-face contact with them. A further inconsistency emerged over whether the Taliban had access to his mobile number.

Having weighed the evidence in the round, the judge concluded that AGIK's shifting explanations had generated further anomalies rather than resolving the original discrepancy, and that this cumulatively undermined the reliability of his account. The section 8 conduct arising from his failure to claim asylum in transit countries was treated as a further, though not determinative, adverse factor.

The tribunal rejected the material elements of AGIK's factual account and dismissed the appeal on asylum, humanitarian protection and human rights grounds. No fee award was made. The anonymity direction protecting AGIK's identity remains in force under rule 13(1)(b) of the Tribunal Procedure (First-tier Tribunal) (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) Rules 2014.