JA (Afghanistan) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

LORD JUSTICE MOORE-BICK LADY JUSTICE GLOSTER and LORD JUSTICE VOS ____________________

Mr. Becket Bedford and Mr. Zane Malik (instructed by Sultan Lloyd) for the appellant Mr. Jonathan Hall (instructed by the Treasury Solicitor) for the respondent Hearing date : 14th March 2014 ____________________

(i) that the Immigration Judge had failed to take into account the respondent's failure to attempt to trace the appellant's family in breach of her duty under the Reception Directive (Directive 2003/09/EC) and regulation 6 of the Asylum Seekers (Reception Conditions) Regulations 2005; and

(ii) that the judge had unreasonably relied on inconsistencies between what the appellant had said in his asylum interview and what he had said in his screening interview, contrary to the principles to be derived from R (Dirshe) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] EWCA Civ 421 , [2005] 1 WLR 2685 .

For some reason that was understood by both the Secretary of State and the tribunal as a statement that both the appellant's parents were currently living in Afghanistan, but it was clearly nothing of the kind, particularly when read in the context of the rest of the interview.