Background
Harold Fernando Munoz Perdomo, Martha Isabel Arteaga Vergara, and her minor daughter are Colombian citizens who sought refugee protection in Canada. Munoz Perdomo and Arteaga Vergara had worked for a Colombian telecommunications company. In 2018, members of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua demanded that Munoz Perdomo provide personal telephone numbers for influential people in Popayán and threatened to kill him and his family if he refused. The family left Colombia for Chile in 2019.
When Munoz Perdomo and Arteaga Vergara returned to Colombia for approximately two weeks in 2022, after more than three years away, a man on a motorcycle told Munoz Perdomo that they had been found and that the group knew they lived in Chile. The Refugee Protection Division accepted that incident and several other parts of their account as credible but rejected their claims because it found viable internal flight alternatives in Cartagena, Bogotá, or Medellín. The Refugee Appeal Division agreed, reasoning that Tren de Aragua had the capacity, but lacked the motivation or continuing interest, to find them elsewhere in Colombia.
The Court’s Holding
The Federal Court granted judicial review and held that the Refugee Appeal Division’s decision was unreasonable. The central question in assessing the proposed internal flight alternatives was whether Tren de Aragua would be motivated to locate the applicants within Colombia—not whether the group had pursued or threatened them while they lived in Chile.
The accepted evidence that Munoz Perdomo was found shortly after returning to Colombia, despite an absence of more than three years, directly contradicted the finding that the group lacked continuing interest in the family. Although the applicants expressly raised that incident on appeal, the Refugee Appeal Division did not address it when analyzing the group’s motivation. Because a decision-maker must confront important evidence that contradicts its conclusion, this omission deprived the decision of the justification, transparency, and intelligibility required on reasonableness review.
The Court set aside the decision and returned the matter to a differently constituted Refugee Appeal Division for redetermination. It did not address the applicants’ remaining argument that the Division had improperly treated Cartagena, Bogotá, and Medellín uniformly, and it certified no question of general importance.
Key Takeaways
- An internal flight alternative defeats a refugee claim only if the claimant does not face a serious risk of persecution there and relocation would be reasonable in all the circumstances.
- Evidence that alleged persecutors located a claimant soon after a brief return to the country of origin may be central to whether they remain motivated to pursue the claimant elsewhere in that country.
- An administrative decision may be unreasonable when it fails to address credible, expressly raised evidence that materially contradicts its decisive finding.
Why It Matters
The ruling reinforces that an internal-flight-alternative analysis must focus on the risk within the claimant’s country of origin and must meaningfully engage with evidence bearing on both the persecutor’s capacity and motivation. Evidence of limited contact with relatives or an absence of threats abroad cannot substitute for consideration of credible evidence that the persecutor located the claimant after a return home.
For refugee practitioners, the decision highlights the importance of identifying evidence that directly contradicts an asserted loss of persecutor interest. Appeal tribunals need not discuss every item in the record, but they must grapple with material evidence going to the heart of their conclusion.