AA v The Secretary of State for the Home Department

Facts

The appellant, AA, is a citizen of Iraq of Kurdish ethnicity who claimed protection in the United Kingdom on 19 December 2021 on the basis that he would be at risk on return by reason of his imputed political opinion. His account was that he had served as a police officer in Iraq since 2003 and that in July 2021 he was transferred to a role at a detention centre in which he was expected to use violence and intimidation to extract confessions from detainees. He refused, was threatened by a senior officer, locked in a room overnight and fired upon at close range, sustaining shrapnel injuries; after a period at his uncle's house he fled the country. The Secretary of State refused the claim by a decision dated 19 April 2024, accepting his identity, nationality and ethnicity but rejecting his account of having been a police officer or of being of adverse interest to the Iraqi authorities, relying on a series of asserted inconsistencies between his screening interview, his 'continue asylum claim' form and his asylum interviews. He appealed to the First-tier Tribunal under the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. At the hearing the respondent conceded that, if the account were credible, neither internal relocation nor sufficiency of protection would be available, leaving credibility as the only issue.