illogical and inconsistent… plainly in error… plainly wrong… tenuous and unsubstantiated… failed to provide any reasoning… there is a basic minimum which is needed and, with respect to the Judge, it is lacking in this case…

The Court of Appeal there, taking the “highly unusual” step of allowing an asylum appeal on the facts because the First-tier Tribunal had made a such a woeful hash of it. As is normal practice in such cases, the tribunal judge is not named.

It is hard to understand how a determination described in such excoriating terms passed muster in the Upper Tribunal as well, but there we are. Back the case goes to the First-tier Tribunal to have another go, three years after its first attempt. The judgment is SB (Sri Lanka) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 160.

Update: there is now more on this case on the Garden Court website. Patrick Lewis says that the case “gives important guidance as to how Tribunal judges should approach the assessment of credibility in asylum cases, the scope of judges’ duty to give reasons for their findings, and the circumstances in which an appellate court will interfere with a judge’s findings of primary fact”.

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