NAM v Secretary of State for the Home Department: tribunal dismisses Iraqi honour-based violence asylum appeal

The First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), sitting in Birmingham, has dismissed the protection appeal of an Iraqi Kurdish woman who claimed she faced a real risk of being killed by her brothers over a marriage entered into without their consent.

In NAM v Secretary of State for the Home Department (PA/77939/2024), Judge S. Aziz found that although the respondent had accepted the appellant's nationality and conceded that the alleged harm, if established, would amount to persecution for a Convention reason, the core factual account could not be relied upon.

The appellant, a member of the Jaff tribe from Sulaymaniyah, claimed her brothers had controlled her movements and opposed her marriage to a taxi driver she met while attending tailoring classes. She said the couple fled the family home in 2016, relocated within Iraq until 2019, and then left the country after fearing her brothers' connections to the PUK and Peshmerga would eventually allow them to trace her.

While the tribunal accepted the appellant's claimed tribal affiliation, it identified a series of inconsistencies that undermined the remainder of her account. These included a materially altered version of her evidence concerning a purported tribal custom against women marrying, which she had described consistently across several answers at her substantive interview before recasting it following re-examination. The judgement noted that her explanation, that the interpreter had misunderstood her, was undermined by her own confirmation that the interview record had been read back to her without objection.

A further inconsistency arose over when the appellant first met her husband, with her oral evidence initially placing this in 2019 before reverting, once challenged, to the 2016 date given in earlier statements. The tribunal found this was not a simple error given how firmly the later date had been maintained.

The judgement also examined the plausibility of the appellant conducting a secret relationship and subsequent elopement from within what she described as a tightly controlled family environment, concluding that her explanations, including reliance on a mobile telephone she said belonged to her mother, did not withstand scrutiny. Similarly, the tribunal considered it difficult to reconcile the claimed reach and influence of her brothers with the fact that she and her husband lived undetected in Qara Tapa for roughly three years and later departed Iraq through official channels using their own identities without difficulty.

Section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 was engaged, the tribunal having found no satisfactory explanation for the couple's failure to claim asylum in France, where they had been fingerprinted, or in other safe countries en route to the United Kingdom.

The judgement also addressed the evidential weight attached to a witness statement from the appellant's husband, who did not give oral evidence after concerns were raised regarding his health following a reported cardiac or neurological episode shortly before the hearing. The tribunal accepted that the decision not to call him arose from genuine health concerns rather than any reluctance to participate, but noted that reduced weight followed from the inability to test his evidence in cross-examination.

Having rejected the credibility of the appellant's account in its entirety, the tribunal found it unnecessary to consider the alternative issues of state protection and internal relocation. The claim regarding an inability to obtain replacement identity documentation was dismissed on the same basis, as was the appellant's Article 8 claim, which counsel had accepted stood or fell with the substantive protection claim.

The appeal was dismissed on all grounds, with no fee award made. An anonymity direction remains in place under rule 13 of the Tribunal Procedure (First-tier Tribunal) (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) Rules 2014.