K v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Serbia and Montenegro)

b) The appellant was raped, as the adjudicator accepted, by Serb soldiers in Kosovo in April 1999; but her husband does not know about that, and she is afraid of the consequences if he were to find out. The adjudicator dealt with the article 8 issues arising as follows:

[bis] The Article 8 argument has been raised at the first time at the hearing. The Respondent has had no notice of this , but I have nevertheless given consideration to the arguments put forward by Mr Merrylee. The Appellant's husband would leave her with the children, and she would be ostracised and ill-treated by the civilian population.

Lord Phillips in Ahsan Ullah and Thi Lien Do (2002 EWCA Civ 1856 ) in the Court of Appeal at paragraph 64:

Where the Convention is invoked on the sole ground of the treatment to which an alien, refused the right to enter or remain, is likely to be subjected by the receiving state, and that treatment is not sufficiently severe to engage Article 3, the English court is not required to recognise that any other Article of the Convention is, or may be engaged. Where such treatment falls outside Article 3, there may be cases which justify the grant of exceptional leave to remain on humanitarian grounds.

Even if the Appellant is right, and her husband would discover that she had been raped, I would have to be persuaded that he would act in a hostile manner towards her, leave her and take away the children. She has not said that she fears physical violence. When she described her behaviour, the only hint of violence was his hitting the doors. This in itself does not show a tendency to violence.