AKD25 v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs [2026] FedCFamC2G 257

Note: The Court may vary or set aside a judgment or order to remedy minor typographical or grammatical errors (r 24.04(g) Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (Division 2) (General Federal Law) Rules 2025 (Cth)), or to record a variation to the order pursuant to

r 24.04 Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (Division 2) (General Federal Law) Rules 2025 (Cth).

1. The applicant is a citizen of Pakistan. He arrived in Australia on 22 April 2018 as the holder of a student visa. He applied for a protection visa on 6 December 2018. In the protection visa application, the applicant claimed to fear harm at the hands of the Taliban because they tried to kill him. He said that if he is required to go back to Pakistan, the Taliban will find him and kill him.
2. The applicant said that he was physically and mentally harmed by the Taliban in Pakistan. He sought the help of authorities, but law enforcement and other security organisations are "helpless." The applicant said that he tried to move around Pakistan but "as a cancer, the Taliban are everywhere" and they have a strong communication network which will make him an easy target.
3. The summary of the applicant's claims is that he experienced harm at the hands of the Taliban, broadly because of his father's involvement in the army, his own involvement as a student at Cadet College, and his own involvement as a social worker.
4. A central part of the applicant's claims, as set out in an undated statement that he submitted with the visa application, was that he was abducted when he was crossing the road. The applicant's face was covered. He was put in a car and beaten. His hands were tied. He did not know where he was going. After 20 minutes, the car stopped driving. The applicant was taken somewhere, and he was interrogated about why he was studying in the "infidel college" and why he is "running welfare that is backed by the West."
5. The applicant's face and head was bashed and he was kicked in the bladder. He was unconscious. He regained consciousness at about 2 am. He found himself untied. He successfully escaped. The applicant went to a village at a random house. The man gave him his mobile phone and the applicant called his brother. Shortly afterwards his father and his brother and their friends came to get him. They took him to the hospital, but the applicant was ultimately left with lasting bladder damage.
6. The delegate refused the application on 20 December 2019. The applicant applied to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for a review of the delegate's decision on 7 January 2020.
7. Before the Tribunal, the applicant confirmed in his oral evidence that he did not fear harm in Pakistan beyond the fears that were related to his cadet involvement, his escape from captivity and his charitable work. The applicant said that he would be at a heightened risk of harm because once he escaped, his captors would be embarrassed, and they might perceive him as a challenge to their authority.
8. The applicant also said that there was the prospect of information about his return being shared by people in Australia with those who might seek to harm him in Pakistan. The applicant claimed that he had attended an army cadet college and later established a blood donation charity called the Bilal Blood Donors, which later changed its name to Ehsar Welfare Trust.
9. The applicant then created the Wall of Kindness. He said he became famous. He did some media interviews, and he said that that resulted in threatening phone calls and his eventual kidnap by the Taliban.
10. The Tribunal accepted that the applicant attended the cadet college from 2012 until around July 2015, occasionally returning on a few occasions after that. It also accepted that the applicant was a leader within the college and that he was placed in a position where he was in charge of parading the cadets. In terms of past charitable activities, the Tribunal was prepared to accept that newspapers interviewed the applicant about these matters, but it was not satisfied and did not accept that the interviews, either individually or cumulatively, resulted in the applicant becoming famous or becoming of any particular or relevant notoriety beyond his home area.
11. The Tribunal did not accept that the applicant was abducted. It found the claim to be fictional and contrived. The Tribunal was satisfied that the applicant had attempted to weave into the overall narrative aspects of his genuine life experiences, but falsely attributed those events to a fictitious kidnapping. In doing so, the Tribunal pointed to a number of concerns about the applicant's credibility. These included, for example:

(a) That before the Tribunal the applicant claimed that he was struck with the butt of a rifle and lost consciousness in his abduction. But the Tribunal assessed that in the written claims the applicant did not include a claim that he was struck with the butt of a rifle.

(b) The Tribunal also pointed to discrepancies in the evidence about whether the applicant was brought to the hospital by his father, brother and his friends, or by the police.

(c) The Tribunal also observed that medical reports that were dated in 2018 and 2019 showed that the applicant had been experiencing his medical condition, including self-catheterising, for some six years, suggesting that the issue then predated the alleged kidnapping and assault in 2015.

(d) Also of concern to the Tribunal was the discrepancies and irregularities in some of the documents that the applicant submitted, including from 12 October 2015, which incorrectly recorded his date of birth; also a document dated 19 November 2015, where the hospital's name was partially covered, his date of birth was incorrectly recorded and his gender was noted as female. The Tribunal was also concerned about the genuineness of the first incident police report. This was also a matter of concern to the delegate, where it is recorded that the applicant was reported missing at 8.30 am on 11 October 2015, inconsistent with his claim in the protection visa interview that he was kidnapped at 4 pm on that day.

1. These matters were all discussed with the applicant by the Tribunal, his response was obtained, and it was taken into account in the Tribunal's analysis. As I have touched on, the Tribunal considered that:

The applicant attempted to construct a narrative of past harm by incorporating actual medical issues that he had already been experiencing into the alleged events around the kidnapping as a deliberate attempt to bolster his claims, rather than there being an accurate account of events.

1. This was found to further erode the credibility of his narrative. The Tribunal did:

...not accept that the applicant was struck with the butt of a rifle, kicked in the bladder or that his existing medical condition was as a result of, or in any way related to, being kidnapped by the Taliban or any other group.

1. The Tribunal accepted that the applicant received money from an uncle in the United States, as he had referred to in the interview, but it was not satisfied that anyone in Pakistan would be aware of that, or that the applicant would be imputed to have received or obtained funds from the West. It did not accept that the applicant would be of adverse interest because of this fact.
2. The Tribunal also accepted that the applicant was involved in charity activities relating to blood donation and the Wall of Kindness. As I have observed, the Tribunal accepted that the applicant was previously a cadet. However, the Tribunal did not accept that the applicant was threatened or kidnapped by the Taliban or any other group, or that he would be of adverse interest as having escaped from custody or captivity of the Taliban, or any other group.
3. The Tribunal was not satisfied that the applicant would face a real chance of serious harm, either now or in the reasonably foreseeable future, for any reason. The Tribunal was not satisfied that the applicant has a well-founded fear of persecution within the meaning of s 5J of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth). The Tribunal then went on to consider the applicant's claims against the complementary protection criterion and, relying on the anterior findings in the refugee assessment found that he does not face a real risk of significant harm. The Tribunal was not satisfied that there are substantial grounds for believing that, as a necessary and foreseeable consequence of him being removed from Australia to Pakistan, there is a real risk that he will suffer significant harm.
4. Accordingly, the Tribunal decided to affirm the decision under review.
5. The applicant applied for judicial review of the Tribunal's decision on 17 January 2025. He has been self-represented throughout the proceedings. There are two grounds of review that are pleaded.
6. A registrar made directions on 5 September 2025 in preparation for the matter to proceed to hearing. The applicant has not filed any written submissions, or any amended application, or any additional evidence, in accordance with the registrar's orders. As he was self-represented, I provided the applicant the opportunity to explain orally the matters that he said went to the grounds of review, including to address additional particulars, to add any further grounds of review, to amend the existing grounds of review or to submit any evidence in relation to the review.
7. The applicant did not formally add to or amend the grounds of review or submit any additional evidence, but he made submissions to me that, in a sense, expanded upon the grounds of review and which the Minister's legal representative was able to make submissions about. I also explained to the applicant, in that process, the limitation on the Court's jurisdiction: that it is not permitted to conduct a merits review of the Tribunal's decision, that it is not a hearing into whether the Tribunal should have accepted his claim of abduction or not and that the Court does not have the power to grant the applicant a visa. I also set out some of the commonly recognised categories of jurisdictional error for the applicant, many of which are set out, albeit generally, in the application as it is.
8. I also explained, in short summary, that in order to be entitled to the relief he is seeking, the applicant must establish that the Tribunal's decision is affected by jurisdictional error as exceeding the limits of its decision-making authority conferred by the statute[1] in a way that is material, in the sense that the error could reasonably have deprived the applicant of a successful outcome.[2]

1. The delegate's decision records a finding about the Facebook page, starting with:

The applicant claimed at the age of 15 years, while still at cadet college, he came up with the idea to help his community by organising volunteers and a roster for blood donors for the local hospitals. The applicant claimed he commenced this programme in 2014, while on school holidays, and it took him two months and 10 days to organise a pool of over 500 donors. When asked how he achieved so many people in a short space of time he claimed he set up a Facebook page instructing people how to donate. The applicant did not provide any evidence of this Facebook page, and an open search was conducted with no results being located on the name 'Bilal blood donors'.

1. The applicant made submissions to me at this hearing about what occurred before the Tribunal. Some of those matters were not supported by evidence and are not relevant to whether the Tribunal made a jurisdictional error.
2. The applicant referred to the change of the name of the Bilal Blood Donors to the Ehsar Welfare Trust, in relation to what a Facebook search might reveal. The fact of the name change was recorded by the Tribunal.
3. The applicant also told me that he became emotional, said he was crying in his evidence before the Tribunal. There is no evidence of that fact. It is not apparent in the record. The applicant also appeared to walk back, to some extent, in his submissions, the use of the word "famous". To some degree, though, as I have pointed out, the word "famous" was a word that the applicant used in his application, including it in the written statement made in support of the application.
4. I discussed with the applicant a number of areas of jurisdictional error that are raised in ground 1, but that are not particularised or expanded on.
5. There is not any transcript of the Tribunal hearing in evidence before me, so I do not know what was discussed between the applicant and the Tribunal about Facebook beyond what is recorded in the written reasons, or whether, for example, the applicant invited the Tribunal member to search through Facebook in the hearing. However, I note that the Tribunal is not required to refer to each and every piece of evidence, or make findings about each and every piece of evidence, but what is important, in my opinion, is that the Tribunal gave the applicant the benefit of the doubt about his claim that he organised 500 people to give blood. That finding was footnoted citing Randhawa v Minister for Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs.[3]
6. The Tribunal was not required to uncritically accept the applicant's claims or have rebutting evidence before it could decide to not accept his claims, and the Tribunal was not required to make the applicant's case for him. Fact finding is a matter for the Tribunal and as part of that function, the Tribunal must consider the material it considers relevant to its reasoning and to give that material weight that it considers appropriate.
7. Within that context, I explained to the applicant that disagreement with Tribunals' findings, generally, is no more than a request for an impermissible merits review of the decision.
8. In considering the Tribunal's findings, in my opinion the Tribunal was careful and considered in the way that it set out and analysed the applicant's claims. I make that observation in the context of ground 1 that alleges that the Tribunal's findings were contrary to the evidence, unreasonable, effectively illogical and irrational.
9. In my opinion, the findings were open on the evidence and particularly to the ground, as I see the complaint most directly, it was open for the Tribunal to accept the claim about the blood donation - that is, accept it notwithstanding, in a sense, the reservations that it had - give the applicant the benefit of the doubt, but also then go on to find that the evidence did not have the individual or cumulative result that the applicant became famous or that he was of any particular notoriety beyond his home area in a way that was relevant.
10. Before the Tribunal performed its analysis of the applicant's claims it directed itself, recognising that the assessment of credibility is a difficult task, which should be careful, thoughtful and conducted reasonably and fairly.
11. The Tribunal observed that any inconsistencies may or may not be significant, and allowances may be required where an account is given through an interpreter. It also set out that the benefit of the doubt should usually be given to those who are generally credible but cannot substantiate their claims.
12. The Tribunal gave the applicant the benefit of the doubt in a limited sense, in relation to the organisation of the 500 people to give blood. But then, more broadly and more centrally, the Tribunal's analysis of the number of issues that it identified in the applicant's evidence that undermined the credibility of his claims went much further.
13. In the hearing before me, it was apparent the applicant remains unhappy about the Tribunal not accepting his claims and, in a sense, considers it an affront. The applicant explained that he did as much as he could do and he still was not believed, effectively. The applicant made a number of submissions to me, particularly in reply that, as he said to the Tribunal, reaffirmed his explanations about the various matters put forward to the Tribunal that ultimately the Tribunal did not accept.
14. Where the applicant's focus is directed to the findings the Tribunal made at paragraph [63] and [66] as being, in a sense, contrary to the evidence or irrational, I do not accept that the Tribunal's reasoning should be interpreted in that way. It was not, in my view, illogical or irrational in its analysis. I do not accept the generalised submissions that were made by the applicant that the Tribunal's approach constitutes jurisdictional error for any of the more broad bases set out in ground 1 as pleaded.
15. In those circumstances, I will dismiss ground 1.

1. Ground 2 goes to an allegation that the Tribunal failed to give proper, realistic and genuine consideration and took into account irrelevant considerations.
2. In submissions, the applicant also appeared to me to express some level of frustration with the Tribunal's decision to place no weight in documents that he submitted. The applicant said that it would have been easy for the Tribunal to contact police and doctors in Pakistan and confirm the veracity of documents. The applicant effectively said that, as I understand it, the Tribunal should have asked him to supply more evidence or made its own inquiries to satisfy itself about the genuineness of the documents.
3. The Tribunal was not under any obligation to inquire. The role of the Tribunal is to review. It is not inquisitorial and as I have said, it is an applicant's responsibility to satisfy the Tribunal of the matters that were required to meet the criteria for the grant of a visa and not the Tribunal's obligation to make an applicant's case for them.
4. Insofar as this ground talks about an obligation or a duty to inquire, the circumstances in which a decision will be set aside on that basis, on the ground of a failure to inquire, are very limited. I do not consider that this is a case, in all the circumstances, where there was any obvious matter that was apparent that could be easily ascertained and that required a further inquiry, or any inquiry at all, by the Tribunal.
5. The Tribunal approached the issues in an orthodox fashion. It gave the applicant the opportunity to ask the Tribunal to obtain oral evidence from any witnesses and put documents before it. The Tribunal identified the concerns it had about the documents - the inconsistencies in them - and raised those concerns about the veracity of the documents with the applicant at the hearing. The Tribunal took his responses into account and incorporated them as part of its analysis. It also had regard to the nature of the errors - things like dates of birth, gender, an overlay on the document letterhead - and it also assessed that in the context of country information that indicated that document fraud is prevalent in Pakistan.
6. That all, in my opinion, shows a conventional approach to the way in which the Tribunal conducted the hearing about those matters. Ultimately, the Tribunal simply did not accept the applicant's explanations, though in doing that it found, in some instances, that the explanation may have been plausible - that is, for why there were errors in the documents - but given the extent of the issues, found it also to be equally plausible that errors took place as a result of the fraudulent creation of the documents rather than through, for example, hospital errors.
7. To the extent there is any failure to make an inquiry - which I do not consider there is - I do not find that there is any jurisdictional error or, put in the way that it was suggested by the applicant, any constructive failure to exercise jurisdiction or give proper, realistic and genuine consideration to the claim.
8. Equally, in my view, the Tribunal's rejection of the applicant's claim to be kidnapped and harmed was, as I have said, founded on a number of different bases, a number of inconsistencies and contradictions in his evidence and considerable weight that was put in the reports of medical practitioners, which show the medical condition the applicant was experiencing in the chronology before the alleged assault and kidnapping.
9. The applicant also makes submissions in this respect about what he says are inconsistencies between the Tribunal accepting, on the one hand, that it was understandable that the applicant could not recall the precise date on which the kidnapping occurred, and then a significant finding made by the Tribunal to put considerable weight in that chronology of the applicant's medical condition, essentially finding that it predated that kidnapping.
10. However, I do not accept that finding is irrational. In my opinion, there is a significant difference between the Tribunal's first finding - that is to say, about the precise date in October 2015 that the applicant said the abduction took place, on the one hand, and the Tribunal assessing the medical evidence and the conclusions about the medical condition predating 2015, on the other. They are quite different things for the Tribunal - to find it understandable that the applicant could not necessarily be precise about the October 2015 date and the analysis about the medical condition predating that by some years.
11. Ground 2 also alleges that the Tribunal took into account irrelevant considerations. The applicant did not particularly expand upon this claim at the hearing. I do not, as I observed earlier, make any conclusions about these grounds because of lack of particularisation, particularly noting the self-represented status of the applicant.
12. I have however looked at the Tribunal's reasoning, and I cannot identify any apparent error in this regard, or any irrelevant consideration that was taken into account by the Tribunal in reaching its conclusions.

1. I am not satisfied that any of the grounds are made out or that the Tribunal's decision is otherwise affected by jurisdictional error.
2. In the circumstances, I will dismiss the application.

1. Counsel for the Minister has applied for an order that the applicant pay the Minister's costs fixed in the amount of $7,200. The applicant has not made any particular submission in response to the application for costs, but in circumstances where the application that was filed by the applicant has been dismissed and the Minister has done work in preparing for and attending the hearing, including preparing the Court book, I will make an order that the applicant pay the Minister's costs fixed in the sum of $7,200.
2. I consider the sum fixed in that amount to be logical, fair and reasonable having regard to the overview of the work that has been done, and also that amount is below the amount specified in Schedule 2, Part 3, Division 1 of the Federal Circuit and Family Court (Division 2) (General Federal Law) Rules 2025.

I certify that the preceding fifty-four (54) numbered paragraphs are a true copy of the Reasons for Judgment of Judge Liveris.

[1] MZAPC v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2021] HCA 17; (2021) 390 ALR 590 at [29].

[2] Minister for Immigration and Border Protection v SZMTA [2019] HCA 3; (2019) 264 CLR 421 at [45].

[3] [1994] FCA 1253; (1994) 52 FCR 437.