KD v Home Secretary: Court of Appeal overturns asylum ruling for convicted murderer

The Court of Appeal has allowed the Home Secretary's appeal in KD v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWCA Civ 349, overturning decisions of the First-tier Tribunal and Upper Tribunal that had granted asylum to a Turkish national convicted of murder. The judgement, handed down on 23 March 2026 by Lord Justices Peter Jackson, Arnold and Dove, resolves significant questions about the section 72 NIAA 2002 presumption, the application of the Devaseelan guidelines, and the treatment of documentary evidence produced late in proceedings.

KD arrived in the United Kingdom clandestinely in 2001 and claimed asylum on the basis of his Kurdish ethnicity, Alevi faith, and alleged involvement with DHKP-C. An adjudicator dismissed that claim in 2004, finding both KD and his wife to have submitted wholly fraudulent asylum applications. KD remained unlawfully in the UK and in 2005 murdered his wife, for which he received a life sentence with a minimum term of twelve years. Following his release in 2018, he made fresh asylum and human rights claims on the same political grounds, and additionally on the basis of a blood feud arising from the murder. The Home Secretary refused both claims and certified under section 72 that KD constituted a danger to the community. The First-tier Tribunal allowed his appeal; the Upper Tribunal upheld that decision.

Danger to the community

Lord Justice Peter Jackson, giving the lead judgement, held that the First-tier Tribunal's conclusion that KD had rebutted the section 72 presumption was perverse. The index offence — a sustained and fatal stabbing — was of the most extreme gravity, and the Probation Service and Parole Board assessments consistently identified a medium risk of serious harm to intimate partners. The Tribunal had diluted its assessment of the offence's gravity by emphasising that it was a single conviction and had placed undue comfort in the downgrading of that risk from high to medium, a distinction that provided no real reassurance. Drawing on MA (Pakistan) [2014] EWCA Civ 163, the court reiterated that even a 17% probability of reoffending cannot be treated as insignificant in the deportation context; in a case involving potential lethal domestic violence, the bar for displacing the presumption was far higher than the evidence came close to meeting.

Devaseelan and documentary evidence

The court identified multiple failures in the Tribunal's application of Devaseelan [2002] UKIAT 00702. A bare statement that the earlier determination had been treated as the starting point was found to be insufficient. The Tribunal had not applied guideline 6 — which requires issues covered by an earlier determination to be regarded as settled where the facts are not materially different — nor had it interrogated whether the evidence of AD and AHD genuinely advanced a materially different factual case. Both witnesses offered general assertions about KD's political affiliations rather than circumstantial accounts of his activities between 1994 and 2001. The court also criticised the Tribunal's failure to follow Tanveer Ahmed [2002] UKIAT 00439 in relation to the 2001 arrest warrant, which had not been produced at the 2004 hearing and for which no adequate explanation was offered. The Upper Tribunal's decision — described as remarkably slight and resembling a refusal of permission rather than a substantive appellate determination — compounded those errors rather than correcting them.

The 2004 adverse credibility findings on KD's political activities are to be treated as authoritative. His asylum claim and the human rights claim based on imputed political opinion are dismissed.

Blood feud remitted

The human rights claim based on the blood feud, which the First-tier Tribunal had accepted in principle but declined to resolve fully, was not the subject of any cross-appeal by the Home Secretary. That issue is remitted to the Upper Tribunal for expedited reconsideration, with all findings set aside so that sufficiency of protection and internal relocation can be assessed afresh alongside the existence of the feud itself.

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