RB v Secretary of State for the Home Department

Facts

The appellant, RB, arrived in the United Kingdom on 20 June 2007 and claimed asylum, saying she was a Bajuni from the island of Koyama in Somalia, that her clan had been attacked by Darood and Hawiye militia, that she had been raped in 1991 and again in 2004, and that she had spent the years 1993 to 1998 in the Jomvu refugee camp near Mombassa in Kenya. During her screening interview the Home Office referred her for a telephone linguistic analysis by Skandinavisk Språkanalys AB (Sprakab), a Stockholm company; the analysis concluded she was not Somali but a speaker of coastal Kenyan Swahili. The refusal letter of 20 July 2007 adopted that conclusion alongside other credibility points, and a decision was made to remove her as an illegal entrant. Immigration Judge Pugh dismissed her appeal on 31 August 2007, finding she had not told the truth about her origins. The Tribunal refused reconsideration, but on renewal Black J ordered it, concerned that the anonymous Sprakab analyst's credentials had not been established and that the finding sat uneasily with the appellant having given evidence through a Kibajuni interpreter. On reconsideration Senior Immigration Judge Batiste found no findings of fact could be salvaged, and the case was selected as a vehicle for general guidance on linguistic analysis evidence.