Case summaries
Well-grounded information is of central importance to any decision to exclude a person convicted for criminal matters from international protection in accordance with Article 1 F of the 1951 Refugee Convention.
The standardised nature of the questions to the applicants and similarities in the responses recorded do not necessarily indicate a lack of individualised assessment. The applicants were not deprived of an opportunity to submit arguments against their expulsion and did not make any claim of persecution risks in their country of origin. No collective expulsion under Article 4 Protocol 4 has been established.
Similarly, no violation of Article 4 Protocol 4 in conjunction with Article 13 has been established, as the claim cannot be considered arguable.
An application for a revision of a final court decision of the Swiss Federal Court is only admissible if the applicant presents new relevant facts or evidence which he was not able to provide in previous proceedings even if he had acted with due diligence.
If the new evidence relates to another person’s hearing files (in the case at hand a relative’s hearing protocol before the Swiss asylum authority) the fact that the files could not be retrieved during the proceedings cannot be attributed to the applicant if he lacked the required consent from the person concerned to access the files. By rule of principle, it is the asylum authority’s duty to consult relevant documents for the assessment of an application which is notably the case for statements made by family relatives if the factual circumstances on which the respective applications are based are closely related.
The fact that many Uighurs who have returned to China have been detained in “re-education camps”, or have otherwise faced the risk of imprisonment and ill-treatment, combined with the applicants’ individual circumstances, establishes substantial grounds to believe that the applicants would be at real risk of arbitrary detention, and inhuman treatment, or even death, if they were removed to their country of origin.
If implemented, the applicants’ removal to China would be in breach of Articles 2 and 3 of the ECHR.
A Dublin transfer to Bulgaria is annulled due to the vulnerability of the applicant combined with the risk of inadequate psychological treatment in Bulgaria, the applicant’s first country of asylum, and the lack sufficient individual guarantees in case of Dublin transfer.
The ECJ has to decide on the assessment of the existence of a serious individual threat by reason of mere presence in a certain area. It has to decide whether there is a minimal threshold of civilian fatalities that excludes such risk or if a holistic approach taking into account all circumstances special to the case has to be followed to assess the existence of such threat.
The fact that an asylum applicant has already been persecuted in the past or has already suffered serious harm is a serious indication of the well-founded fear of the claimant, or of the real risk of suffering serious harm, unless there is good reason to believe that this persecution or serious harm will not happen again.
When an applicant has suffered female genital mutilation in her country of origin, there is a rebuttable presumption that she will again be the victim of such persecution because of her membership in the social group of Ivorian women.
When a national authority assesses the likely persecution of an applicant for religious purposes in case of return to his/her country of origin, the national authority must evaluate, inter allia, the way the applicant will live his/her faith in his/her country of origin. The Court found that because the applicant is of Hazara ethnic origin and he converted to Christianism in Switzerland, he might face persecution in violation of art. 3 ECHR in case of return to Afghanistan. The TAF did not assess with enough seriousness the consequences of the applicant conversion ex nunc.
In order to guarantee that an applicant for international protection has an effective judicial remedy within the meaning of Article 47 of the Charter, a national court or tribunal is required to vary a decision of the first-instance determining body that does not comply with its previous judgment. The court or tribunal must substitute its own decision on the application for international protection by disapplying, if necessary, the national law that prohibits it from proceeding in that way.
In order to examine prohibitions of deportation, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) has to consider the case of each family member even in cases of family associations separately whether deportation prohibitions exist. In this case, the risk assessment must be based on the assumption that a nuclear family living together in the Federal Republic of Germany will return to its country of origin as a family unit. This also applies if individual family members have already been granted a protection status or if national deportation prohibitions have been established.