MA v Secretary of State for the Home Department: asylum appeal dismissed amid credibility concerns

A First-tier Tribunal has dismissed the protection appeal of an Afghan taxi driver, finding that a series of unresolved inconsistencies across his interviews, witness statement and oral evidence left his account of Taliban persecution unproven, even to the lower standard applicable in such cases.

The appellant, identified as MA under an anonymity order, is from Pol-e-Charkhi village on the outskirts of Kabul, married with nine children and without formal education. He claimed that in July 2020 he witnessed a Taliban member, referred to as 'M', preparing to plant a bomb beneath a small bridge and reported the matter to police, leading to M's arrest by the former government. After the Taliban took power in August 2021, M was released and told the new authorities that MA had informed on him. MA said this led to his own detention for around a week, secured only through the intervention of village elders offering a guarantee known as zamanat. He claimed that after his release, Taliban members attacked and stabbed him at his home, prompting him to flee the country.

The Secretary of State accepted MA's identity and nationality, and did not dispute that the claimed Convention reason, if true, would engage the Refugee Convention. However, the respondent rejected the factual basis of the claim, citing multiple inconsistencies, and relied on section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 given MA's passage through Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland and France without seeking asylum.

Sitting at Birmingham, First-tier Tribunal Judge S. Aziz applied the two-stage test under section 32 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, as set out in JCK (s.32 NABA 2022) Botswana [2024] UKUT 00100. The judge considered submissions attributing discrepancies to interpretation problems in MA's first interview, limited education and psychological distress, but found no medical evidence of depression and concluded, based on the interview transcript, that comprehension issues had been resolved once the interpreter was changed partway through.

Several inconsistencies were found material. MA gave differing accounts of how many individuals were involved in planting the bomb, how he identified the man he named as M given that faces were said to be covered, and whether he was certain at the time that what he saw was an explosive device. A further significant discrepancy concerned the birth dates of his two youngest children, which on his own evidence fell after his stated departure from Afghanistan in August 2021, a point he was unable to satisfactorily resolve. Additional conflicts emerged regarding his reason for being near the bridge, the timing of his arrest relative to the Taliban's return to power, and the chronology of alleged threats against him.

The judge also found the account of his detention and subsequent stabbing to be lacking in sufficient detail given the significance of those events, and considered it difficult to reconcile the Taliban's alleged intent to kill him with their decision to release him and delay any attack. The section 8 conduct was treated as a further adverse factor, though not determinative.

Concluding that the material elements of the claim had not been established, the tribunal dismissed the appeal on asylum, humanitarian protection and human rights grounds. No fee award was made, and the anonymity direction protecting MA's identity continues under rule 13(1)(b) of the Tribunal Procedure (First-tier Tribunal) (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) Rules 2014.