PBA v Home Secretary: tribunal dismisses asylum appeal on credibility grounds

The First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) has dismissed an asylum appeal brought by a Ghanaian national who claimed she and her daughter faced a real risk of harm, including female genital mutilation, if returned to Ghana, ruling that her account was not credible and that adequate state protection was in any event available to her.

The decision, handed down by First-tier Tribunal Judge Boyes following a hearing at Newport on 3 September 2026, is anonymised given the nature of the issues involved. It follows what the tribunal described as an appalling procedural history dating back to July 2023, with two earlier final hearings rendered ineffective. The Home Office had already been the subject of a wasted costs order in respect of those delays, and the judgement was further critical of both parties for submitting an unstructured collection of documents rather than an agreed, chronological bundle, describing the exercise of locating relevant material as unnecessarily burdensome for the tribunal.

The appellant's case was that she had been forced into marriage by her father to settle a family debt, that she was already in a relationship with another man and pregnant by him at the time, and that she travelled to the United Kingdom with her husband before he abandoned her on learning of the pregnancy. She said her husband's family had since threatened her and her mother in Ghana, and feared that if she returned with her daughter, the child would be subjected to FGM as a mark of the family's traditional practices.

The Home Office had initially accepted that the appellant was a victim of forced marriage and had received threats from her husband's family, but withdrew that concession during the proceedings, arguing it had been made without any evidential foundation. Central to the tribunal's assessment was an earlier entry clearance application, submitted some two months before the appellant's successful application to join her husband, in which she had described herself as the unmarried partner of a different named individual, sharing his address and being funded by his employment. The tribunal found this materially inconsistent with her later evidence that the relationship had been purely professional, and rejected her explanation that "partner" had been intended to mean travel companion rather than romantic partner, describing it as lacking any credibility.

Although two expert reports supported the plausibility of debt related forced marriage and the risks associated with FGM in parts of Ghana generally, the tribunal found that the appellant's own evidence undermined her case on the facts. It held that her husband and his family had rejected the child as not belonging to their family, reducing the likelihood of their having any interest in subjecting her to FGM, and that the disputed divorce certificate at the centre of earlier hearings was ultimately irrelevant to that finding.

Applying the guidance in JCK (s.32 NABA 2022) Botswana and the structured approach to credibility in KB & AH v Pakistan, the tribunal concluded that sufficient state protection existed in Ghana for women fearing gender based violence, referencing the Country Policy and Information Note on actors of protection and legislation criminalising FGM. It further found that internal relocation would be reasonable, given the appellant's nursing qualifications, education and ongoing family relationships in Ghana.

The appeal was dismissed on all grounds, with the tribunal finding it in the child's best interests to remain with her mother in Ghana.