SZQLR v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship

[2012] HCASL 146

SZQLR

v

MINISTER FOR IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP & ANOR

[2012] HCASL 146
M52/2012

1. The applicant is a citizen of India.  He claims to fear persecution on religious and/or political grounds should he be returned to India.  The Refugee Review Tribunal ("the Tribunal") upheld a decision of a delegate of the first respondent refusing a protection visa.  It found that the applicant had been harassed by persons seeking payments to a Hindu fundamentalist political party of which he had formerly been a member.  It found that he had twice been struck with sticks by those persons, but he had not been injured.  It also found that there was ill-feeling between the applicant and another person, whom the applicant had prosecuted for a crime.  But the Tribunal found that the applicant had not suffered serious harm and that there was no threat of serious harm.  Hence he had no well-founded fear of persecution.  Even if he had, being a successful goldsmith, he could reasonably be expected to relocate from Ahmedabad to another part of India.

2. The Federal Magistrates Court (Whelan FM) refused the applicant's application for judicial review.  In part, it did so because the applicant was making challenges to the Tribunal's fact finding as to relocation.  In part, it did so because the applicant claimed that the Tribunal had not considered whether he would suffer serious harm, when in fact it had.  And, in part, it did so because the applicant's contention that the Tribunal had failed to consider whether as a "liberal" Hindu the applicant was liable to persecution by "radical" Hindus foundered on the fact that Whelan FM found that the applicant had made no claim of that kind to the Tribunal and no claim of that kind was to be discerned in the material provided to the Tribunal.

3. The Federal Court of Australia (Bromberg J) dismissed an appeal.  His Honour considered that the principal ground of appeal had not been advanced to Whelan FM and that it had no prospects of success.

4. The applicant's written case, filed in support of his application for special leave to appeal to this Court, does not deal with any of the reasoning in the Federal Magistrates Court or the Federal Court of Australia.  In language copied from many other formulaic special leave applications, it relies instead on doctrines and cases which did not appear in the reasoning of those Courts and which depend on factual material absent from this case.

5. The application is dismissed.

6. Pursuant to r 41.10.5 we direct the Registrar to draw up, sign and seal an order dismissing the application.

J.D. Heydon
13 November 2012 V.M. Bell