The Supreme Court has accepted an appeal by an Iranian political asylum seeker and overturned a district court’s ruling which had upheld a decision by the island’s Asylum Service and Refugee Review Authority rejecting his application.
It specifically ruled that the district court had not looked into the applicant’s claim that the officer who rejected his application “was ill-informed about events taking place in Iran.”
And that the competent officer’s information did not come from credible and reliable sources but rather from unreliable sources such as Google and Wikipedia.
The majority ruling by the Supreme Court also said that “the Iranian-born applicant, an administrative officer on cultural affairs at a university in his country, quit his position after he felt his life was threatened because he had openly supported the candidate running against the President of the country during the first round of the 2005 elections.”
And that when he was fired from the university because of this, he had fled to the Republic of Cyprus where he sought political asylum.
However, both the Asylum Service and the Refugee Review Authority rejected his application saying his arguments had been unsubstantiated.
The Supreme Court, however, ruled that when assessing the credibility of the applicant during an oral interview before the Asylum Service, the competent officer had in fact been mistaken.
Read more:
https://in-cyprus.com/decision-time-taken-on-asylum-seeker-applications-to-be-reduced/
