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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Asylum and Immigration Tribunal >> LQ (Age: immutable characteristic) Afghanistan [2008] UKAIT 00005 (15 March 2007) URL: http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKIAT/2008/00005.html Cite as: [2008] UKAIT 5, [2008] UKAIT 00005 |
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LQ (Age: immutable characteristic) Afghanistan [2008] UKAIT 00005
Date of hearing: 6 October 2006
Date Determination notified: 15 March 2007
LQ |
APPELLANT |
and |
|
Secretary of State for the Home Department | RESPONDENT |
A person's age is an immutable characteristic. Although it changes constantly, one can oneself do nothing to change what it is at any particular time.
"10. The appellant's evidence is that he is a Shia Hazare originating from Nawabab in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, the only child of a manual labourer, when he could find work, who died in 2003. His mother disappeared in 1997. To escape the fighting, the appellant and his father went to Iran, his mother disappearing around this time possibly a casualty of the fighting although the appellant's father would not discuss it. They set up home in the city of Hayrez near Shiraz in south Iran and the appellant's father worked when he could, mostly factory work. The appellant had some education in Farsi. The appellant's father became ill and died in 2003. The appellant's father's cousin, […], helped care for the appellant's father in his dying days.
11. The appellant remained in the room his father had rented and received food from the factory where his father had worked but he rapidly ran out of money and had to leave. The appellant accepted an offer from [his father's cousin] to live with him, his wife and two children. [The cousin] proved to be unkind and made the appellant earn his keep by working in the kitchen of the factory where his father had worked. [The cousin] was never satisfied and this led to beatings at his hands. He bears a scar to the right side of his chest from this. On that day the appellant had been to town and spent some of his money thereby enraging [him].
12. At the beginning of August 2005, [the cousin] required the appellant to leave. He took all the appellant's money except for a sufficient sum to pay an agent to take the appellant out of the country. For fear of further beatings from […], the appellant complied. He travelled for 25 days but is aware only of passing through Turkey and France where the agent abandoned him leaving him to cling on to a small compartment of a lorry which 'would take me somewhere safe'. This proved to be the United Kingdom where he arrived on 7 September 2005 and claimed asylum directly he found a police station the next day."
"I differ from the respondent in that, if the appellant went back now, I find that the appellant would be at risk of an Article 3 breach".
The basis for that finding was the expert evidence before him, which the Immigration Judge accepted, subject of course to his own findings about the personal credibility of the appellant. He found that there would be no adequate reception facilities in Afghanistan and that, as an orphan, the appellant would be subject to the risks of exploitation and ill treatment adumbrated in that evidence.
"If there is anything that is not immutable, it is age. The appellant gets older by the day. He is not immutably a child. Neither is the issue of immutability frozen in time to the moment of decision."
C M G OCKELTON
DEPUTY PRESIDENT