Belgium – Council for Alien Law Litigation, 1 February 2011, Nr. 55.443

The application was rejected by the Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGRS) and the appeal before the CALL against this decision was also unsuccessful. A month later the applicant filed a second asylum application, this time by herself. Apart from reiterating the same grounds (persecution following her husband’s political activities), she now also claimed that she had been forced into marriage, that her husband mistreated her and the children, that she had filed a complaint against her husband at a Belgian police station, and that she had now filed for divorce. The applicant claimed that when she informed her parents in Syria of the situation, they threatened her repeatedly and said that they would kill her if she divorced her husband and returned to them in Syria.

The CGRS rejected the asylum application, considering that the applicant’s statements were vague, contradictory and unconvincing. The CGRS also considered that it was not proven that the applicant would be persecuted or ran a risk of serious harm in parts of Syria other than the one where her parents lived. The applicant filed an appeal against this decision.
 

Quoting Art 48/5, § 3 of the Belgian Alien Law (transposition of Art 8 of the Qualification Directive), the CALL considered that it is a provision that limits access to international protection and that its spirit and the manner in which it is formulated indicates that “it is up to the administration to demonstrate its position, i.e., on the one hand, that there is a part of the country of origin where the applicant has no reason to fear persecution and runs no real risk of serious harm, and, on the other hand, that it could be reasonably expected of the applicant to stay in that part of the country. The competent authority also has to demonstrate that it had regard to the general circumstances in the country and to the personal circumstances of the applicant.”

In the case at hand, the CALL found that the CGRS had not undertaken this examination. The case file did not show that the CGRS had taken into consideration the personal situation of the applicant, nor the general situation in the country, in order to decide that it could reasonably be expected for the applicant to stay “elsewhere in Syria,” without taking into account the specifics of her situation as a woman victim of domestic violence and all the possible consequences of such a situation. On the basis of the current case file, the CALL found that it was impossible to conclude that the applicant had a reasonable possibility of staying safely in another part of the country.

The CALL further noted that the case file did not contain the information required for it to take a decision on the merits of the application itself.