SZTAN v Minister for Immigration and Anor (No.2)

The applicant, SZTAN, sought judicial review of a decision by the Refugee Review Tribunal (Tribunal) to refuse his application for a Protection (Class XA) visa. The central dispute concerned whether the Tribunal had made a representation to the applicant that it was unlikely to rely on a particular issue to draw adverse inferences against him, and whether this representation arose from a misinterpretation of the Tribunal's words during the hearing. The matter was heard by Judge Manousaridis in the Federal Court of Australia.

The primary legal issue before the Court was whether the Tribunal had made a representation that it was unlikely to rely on a specific issue to draw adverse inferences against the applicant. A related issue was whether any such representation, if made in English, was misinterpreted into Bengali during the hearing, thereby creating a misleading impression for the applicant. The Court was also required to determine how the proof of such a misinterpretation could be established, specifically whether a misinterpretation from English to Bengali could be inferred from the subsequent interpretation of Bengali back into English.

His Honour found that there was no misrepresentation by the Tribunal. The Court reasoned that the words spoken by the Tribunal in English did not, in their plain meaning, constitute a representation that it was unlikely to rely on the issue in question to draw adverse inferences. Furthermore, the Court held that even if there had been a misinterpretation into Bengali, the evidence did not establish that this misinterpretation gave rise to the alleged representation. The Court concluded that proof of misinterpretation of words spoken in the source language (English) into the target language (Bengali) could not be inferred solely from the interpretation into the source language of words spoken in the target language by which the original words were interpreted.

The application for judicial review was dismissed.