NAM v The Secretary of State for the Home Department

Facts

The appellant, referred to as NAM, is an Iraqi Kurdish woman from Sulaymaniyah and a member of the Jaff tribe, born in 1981. She made a protection claim on 11 July 2023, which the Secretary of State for the Home Department refused on 15 November 2024, and she lodged notice of appeal on 23 November 2024. Her case was that she faced a real risk of being killed by her brothers in an honour-based dispute arising from her marriage: her brothers had prevented her from marrying and controlled her movements, she met her husband, a taxi driver, whilst attending tailoring classes, and she left the family home and married him without their consent. She and her husband lived in Qara Tapa until 2019 before leaving Iraq. She said her brothers were influential through connections with the PUK and Peshmerga structures and could locate her anywhere in Iraq, so that neither state protection nor internal relocation was available. She further claimed she had lost access to her civil status documentation and, being estranged from her family, could not redocument herself. She relied in the alternative on humanitarian protection and Articles 3 and 8 ECHR. The respondent accepted her Iraqi nationality and that the feared harm, if established, would engage the Refugee Convention as membership of a particular social group, but disputed the core account.