1906416 (Refugee)

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal considered the case of an applicant seeking a protection visa, who claimed to be a victim of loan sharks and criminal gangs in Vietnam. The applicant, a businessman, had borrowed money to invest in a business but was unable to repay the loan sharks due to financial difficulties. He alleged that the loan sharks hired gangs to threaten him, and that he feared harm if he returned to Vietnam, asserting that Vietnamese authorities would not provide protection and might even be complicit with gangs.

The primary legal issue before the Tribunal was whether the applicant met the criteria for a protection visa, specifically whether he was a refugee or faced a real risk of significant harm upon removal from Australia to Vietnam. This involved assessing the credibility of his claims regarding threats from loan sharks and gangs, and the availability and effectiveness of state protection in Vietnam. The Tribunal was required to consider the applicant's well-founded fear of persecution or significant harm, and whether any such risk was a necessary and foreseeable consequence of his return.

The Tribunal affirmed the decision not to grant the protection visa. It considered the applicant's statutory declaration detailing his debt and the threats he received, alongside information from the DFAT Country Report for Vietnam concerning loan sharking activities. While acknowledging that illegal moneylending and associated violence were prevalent in Vietnam, and that state protection might be of unclear effectiveness, the Tribunal ultimately found that the applicant did not satisfy the criteria for a protection visa under section 36(2) of the Migration Act 1958. The decision noted that the applicant did not satisfy the refugee criterion under s 36(2)(a) and did not establish that he met the complementary protection criterion under s 36(2)(aa), which requires substantial grounds for believing there is a real risk of significant harm as a necessary and foreseeable consequence of removal.