AM and another v Secretary of State for the Home Department: Court of Appeal allows asylum appeal on credibility reasoning errors

In AM & Anor v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWCA Civ 159, the Court of Appeal (Lady Justice Elisabeth Laing, Lord Justice Cobb, and Lady Justice May) allowed an appeal by an Iraqi Kurdish mother and her daughter against the dismissal of their asylum claim, finding material errors of law in the reasoning of the First-tier Tribunal ("FTT").

AM, the first appellant, claimed a well-founded fear of honour-based violence from her maternal cousin (A) if returned to Iraq. Her account centred on a broken arranged marriage, A's KDP affiliation, his recovery from serious brain injury and subsequent return to Iraq in February 2021, and escalating threats — including an incident in which armed men accompanied A to the family home and a firearm was pointed at AM and her daughter. The family reported the threats to police, who declined to act given A's political connections, and departed Iraq shortly thereafter.

The SSHD refused the claim in July 2023. The FTT dismissed the appellants' appeal in September 2024, finding AM's credibility sufficiently damaged — principally by her failure to claim asylum in France, inconsistencies around identity documentation, and a late disclosure of threats made to her mother — to preclude a finding of real risk of persecution.

The credibility reasoning deficiency

Lady Justice May, giving the lead judgement, identified a fundamental gap in the FTT's reasoning. Whilst a global credibility assessment is both permissible and required, it cannot operate as a substitute for findings on the principal controversial issues. The judge had, at various points in the Determination, employed conditional formulations — "should I accept…", "if I accept her account…" — without ever resolving the underlying factual questions. The core elements of AM's claim: whether she had been contracted to marry A, whether he had threatened her and produced armed men at her home, whether she had complained to police and been rebuffed, and whether A held KDP influence — received no explicit finding. Paragraph 22 of the Determination, acknowledging that "there may be aspects of her claim that are true", made the deficiency starker still. Having accepted that some elements might be truthful, the judge was required to identify which, and to explain why, if those elements included the pre-flight indicia of risk, the claim nonetheless failed at the lower standard of proof. That reasoning was absent.

The judgement confirms, applying SSHD v TC [2023] UKUT 164 (IAC), that a tribunal must marshal the evidence bearing on the principal important controversial issues and provide intelligible reasons for accepting or rejecting it. The parties' characterisation of the sole issue as "credibility" did not relieve the judge of that obligation. The court noted that the judge would have been better served by inviting counsel to identify the specific factual findings on which credibility was said to bear most critically.

Treatment of the husband's evidence

Ground 2 concerned the FTT's failure to address the evidence of D, AM's husband, who gave first-hand evidence of the pre-flight events and was better placed than AM to speak to certain matters, including the preparedness of his uncle to offer further assistance. The only substantive reference to D's evidence in the Determination — that "to some extent" it failed to corroborate his wife's account on documentation — left open the question of what the tribunal made of his evidence on the essential elements of the claim. Lady Justice May granted permission on Ground 2 and held that the same reasoning deficiency applied: it was impossible for a well-informed reader to determine which aspects of D's account had been accepted or rejected.

The appeal was allowed on both grounds. The case is remitted to a differently constituted FTT for a fresh hearing. The judgement serves as a reminder that a finding on overall credibility, however justified by collateral considerations, must be accompanied by reasoned conclusions on the specific factual questions central to the risk assessment.

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