Case summaries
It is necessary to distinguish between the legal requirement to register a religious group under the law of the country of origin and enforcing such a registration with reasonable instruments permitted by the law, and the repressive actions of security units or other bodies of public authority towards members of a religious group that represent obvious excesses beyond the sphere of provisions permitted by law and which, at the same time, may, depending on particular circumstances, individually or on a cumulative basis, reach the intensity of persecution.
As soon as one persecution ground (in this case religion) exists and the other conditions for qualifying for refugee status are fulfilled, refugee status must be recognised rather than subsidiary protection, including in a context of generalised violence.
The applicant claimed asylum on the grounds of having suffered female genital mutilation (FGM) and being subject to a forced marriage. The Ministry of Interior refused the application and the applicant lodged an appeal before the High National Court who also rejected the appeal (the applicant was granted a residence permit for humanitarian reasons). The applicant filed an appeal to the Supreme Court.
The petition for an ab initio examination of the asylum application was rejected by the General Secretary of the Ministry of Public Order (decision being appealed in this case) because the evidence submitted was not deemed to be new and crucial. That ruling in the contested decision was flawed because the General Secretary did not have the authority to decide whether the Applicant had refugee status deeming the evidence submitted (a medical report which linked clinical findings to torture) to not be crucial for granting asylum. Instead, he should have ordered an ab initio examination of the asylum application, making the Administration comply with the relevant procedure. If, during that procedure, it was found that there was a legitimate case, then the Administration should have recognised the Applicant as a refugee.
It is lawful to refer an ethnic Armenian applicant from Chechnya to internal protection in other regions of the Russian Federation.
Asylum applicants who have already been subject to persecution also benefit from the facilitated standard of proof of Art 4.4 of the Qualification Directive in the course of the examination of whether an internal protection alternative is available to them.
Art 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights may be engaged in suicide cases where the fear giving rise to the risk of suicide is not objectively well-founded.
The case concerned the inadmissibility of an application for international protection considering the Dublin II criteria and the validity of a visa.
This case concerned an appeal against a decision of the Ministry of Interior (MOI) refusing a claim for international protection from a Kosovan applicant who argued that his special skill as a kick boxer would place him within the meaning of a particular social group and that he should be afforded the protection within the Refugee Convention. It was found that the applicant did not belong to any particular social group and he could find protection in his country of origin.
The fact that Poland agreed to take charge of the asylum procedure of a whole family is, by itself, not a proper basis for an inadmissibility decision. The hierarchy of the criteria for determining the Member State responsible for the procedure on the merits, set out in Art 5(1) Dublin II Regulation, must be respected. In this case the husband and father of the family had already been admitted to the procedure on the merits and, therefore, Art 8 was applicable prior to Art 14.