Background
The applicant, a 38-year-old Nigerian national, arrived in Ireland in 2021 and sought international protection based on events stemming from a 2011 road traffic accident in Nigeria. While driving his truck, two boys on a motorbike collided with him and died of their injuries. The deceased were sons of a prominent politician and a powerful businessman respectively. Although police confirmed the boys were intoxicated and the applicant was not at fault, both families orchestrated a sustained campaign of violence against him: his truck was burned out, he was attacked and stabbed, and his family home was destroyed. After relocating within Nigeria and fearing continued persecution, he left the country in October 2011, eventually travelling through Libya, Italy, Germany, France, and the UK before reaching Ireland.
The International Protection Office rejected his claim in November 2023. He appealed to the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT), which held an oral hearing in December 2024. In its March 2025 decision, the Tribunal accepted the applicant’s account as credible and accepted that he had suffered serious harm, but rejected the appeal on the grounds that no Convention nexus had been established, that state protection was available in Nigeria, and that internal relocation to areas such as Enugu, Ekiti, or Abia was a viable option.
The applicant sought judicial review of the Tribunal’s decision on three grounds: (1) unlawful reversal of the statutory presumption under s. 28(6) of the International Protection Act 2015; (2) failure to properly assess state protection in light of his particular circumstances, specifically that his persecutors were politically powerful and effectively above the law; and (3) failure to apply the correct legal test for internal relocation.
The Court’s Holding
Mr Justice Ferriter found that the Tribunal had erred in its treatment of the s. 28(6) presumption at paragraph 35 of its decision, improperly framing the question as whether there was any good reason to consider that past persecution would be repeated, rather than applying the statutory presumption of future risk unless good reasons existed to conclude otherwise. However, the Court held this error was not independently fatal because the Tribunal had in substance proceeded thereafter on the correct alternative basis — addressing state protection on the assumption that a future risk existed — so the applicant was not deprived of the benefit of the presumption in practice.
The decisive ground for quashing the decision was the Tribunal’s failure to assess the availability of state protection through the prism of the applicant’s actual case. The applicant’s core contention was that his persecutors — the politically connected fathers of the deceased boys — were powerful enough to operate above the law in a country where the police force was susceptible to endemic corruption. The Court found that the Tribunal had entirely failed to engage with this argument: it assessed the Nigerian police’s capacity to handle “ordinary crimes” in general terms, but never addressed whether state protection would be effective against non-state actors with the specific political power and connections described by the applicant. This omission amounted to legal error requiring the decision to be quashed.
On internal relocation, the Court noted for completeness — since the state protection finding rendered it strictly unnecessary — that the Tribunal’s single passing reference to relocation options, made only in the context of the s. 28(6) analysis, plainly fell short of the careful, two-stage inquiry required by law: whether there is a risk of persecution in the proposed area of relocation, and whether it would be reasonable to expect the applicant to remain there. An order of certiorari was granted and the matter remitted to a freshly constituted Tribunal.
Key Takeaways
- A Tribunal assessing state protection must analyse it through the lens of the applicant’s specific circumstances — including the identity, power, and connections of the alleged persecutors — not simply assess the general effectiveness of police for ordinary crime.
- An error in applying the s. 28(6) presumption will not automatically vitiate a decision if the Tribunal in substance proceeds to address state protection on the basis that a future risk exists; the real question is whether the applicant was deprived of the benefit of the presumption in practice.
- Internal relocation findings require a two-stage careful analysis: (i) is there a risk of persecution in the proposed relocation area, and (ii) is it reasonable to expect the applicant to remain there? A passing reference to suggested locations is legally insufficient.
- Where COI acknowledges corruption and lack of accountability at top levels of government, a Tribunal must specifically consider how that corruption may affect the applicant’s access to protection given the status of his or her persecutors.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces that state protection assessments in international protection cases must be individualised and case-specific, not generic. It is not enough for a Tribunal to conclude that a country has a broadly functioning police force; where an applicant’s persecutors derive their power from political connections that may place them beyond accountability, the Tribunal must squarely confront that argument using the relevant country of origin information. The judgment is a practical reminder that omitting a key plank of an applicant’s case from the decision’s framing of the issues — as occurred here with the politically connected status of the persecutors — can infect the entire subsequent analysis.
The Court’s observations on internal relocation, though technically obiter, provide useful guidance for future Tribunal hearings: where an applicant asserts a nationwide risk and state protection is in doubt, a bare reference to alternative locations is legally vulnerable. Tribunals must engage in a structured, evidence-based assessment of both the safety of proposed relocation sites and the reasonableness of expecting the applicant to move there in light of their personal circumstances.