Ahmed (Migration)

This matter concerned appeals by the review applicant, Ms Zebiba Awel Ahmed, against the refusal to grant Child (Migrant) (Class AH) Subclass 117 (Orphan relative) visas to two Ethiopian citizens. The applicants' mother was deceased, and their father's whereabouts were declared as "unknown" in their visa applications. The review applicant, who claimed to be the siblings' sister, sponsored the visa applications. The Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) heard the reviews after a delegate of the Minister for Immigration refused to grant the visas.

The primary legal issue before the Tribunal was whether the applicants satisfied the criterion under regulation 1.14(b) of the Migration Regulations 1994, specifically that their father's whereabouts were unknown. This required the Tribunal to assess the evidence presented regarding the father's disappearance and any enquiries made to locate him.

The Tribunal's reasoning focused on the lack of persuasive evidentiary support for the claim that the father's whereabouts were unknown. It noted an inconsistency between the review applicant's assertion that her father disappeared in 2007 and her brother Saifudin's earlier statement to the Immigration Department in 2011 that their father was imprisoned in 2008 and had not been contacted since. While acknowledging the possibility of calendar reconciliation difficulties, the Tribunal found that even accepting the claims at face value, there was no corroborating evidence or contemporaneous historical evidence demonstrating that enquiries had been made to ascertain the father's whereabouts. The Tribunal concluded that the applicants had not satisfied the burden of proof to demonstrate that their father's whereabouts were unknown.