Alam v Minister for Immigration & Multicultural Affairs

REASONS FOR JUDGMENT 1 The applicant, a citizen of Bangladesh, seeks judicial review of a decision of the Refugee Review Tribunal given on 13 July 1999 refusing him refugee asylum in Australia. There are no true issues of law raised by the application for review even though some of its elements are dressed up as legal questions. The applicant essentially seeks to argue that the Tribunal made factual errors, and those matters are not reviewable by this Court. 2 The only feasible question of law raised in the application was that the hearing before the Tribunal was conducted with the assistance of an interpreter who, although speaking Bengali, was actually an Indian and not a Bangladeshi. The inference is partially dialectic and partially incompetence. The applicant appears to be claiming that he did not understand some questions which were asked of him and as a consequence answers were recorded which he did not intend. The Tribunal's decision was therefore made, so it was generally implied, on evidence which was not his own. 3 If such a claim could be made out and the matters involved were material to the decision, there may very well be a reviewable question of law and the applicant's case might at least advance toward a result of this review that would require a further hearing. However, I have carefully read the applicant's statutory declaration dated 27 March 1997 which was presented to and read by the Tribunal. Since that time the applicant made an affidavit dated 10 November 1999 in which he sought to explain some aspects of the statutory declaration which he said were erroneous, and to further explain certain facts which he claimed were relevant to his case. 4 I have considered the matters that have been raised in that connection in the context of the Tribunal's decision, including the applicant's reference in the affidavit to the problems that he claims existed in respect of the interpreter. It seems likely to be true that there were some problems with the interpreter. Indeed, the respondent does not take issue with the fact that the problem pointed to by the applicant did in fact exist. 5 The applicant appears to rely in this regard upon the competence of the interpreter in terms of being able to translate the Bangladeshi version of Bengali. He said that he was compelled to accept this inadequate interpreter, but the facts appear to show that that is not correct. At the hearing of the Tribunal he was assisted by a person who spoke Bengali although also apparently not a Bangladeshi. Because the applicant's adviser or assistant could draw to the Tribunal's attention any language problems, there was adequate protection for any misinterpretations that might arise. No real suggestion has been made that the interpreter was biased against the applicant and there is in any event no evidence of any such bias. Certainly there could be no problems with the applicant's own adviser. If he had thought that the interpreter was deliberately or negligently misinterpreting significant evidence, it is likely that he would have spoken up and drawn the Tribunal's attention to it. 6 There are questions that have been raised in some cases about the problem of competent interpretation and the way in which its absence might result in a judicial review, but it is not necessary to consider those cases in the present context because none of the potentially permissible circumstances exist. There is nothing which I can see which would lead a court to believe that some manifest breach of the relevant provisions of the statute, in particular sections 425 and 476, have in some way been breached by what happened in this particular case. 7 So far as the substance of the case is concerned, the corrections which the applicant seeks to make to the statutory declaration by way of his recent affidavit seem to me to have nothing to do with the ultimate decision at all. There may well have been a mistake in the statutory declaration and possibly in the evidence which the applicant gave about the involvement of a relative in one of the political parties in Bangladesh, but as I see it, it had little to do with the ultimate decision of the Tribunal. 8 The Tribunal accepted quite a number of the applicant's assertions, and some facts turn out to be not - or not seriously - in dispute. But at the end of the day the applicant's claim boils down to the fact that if he is returned to Bangladesh he will be subject to persecution on the grounds that he was a supporter and a member of the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party and this would result in torture, imprisonment and other forms of persecution. He claims to fear the persecution concerned. 9 No doubt if his assertions were correct and his fears were supported by some objective evidence, there would be some substance to his claims, but the Tribunal examined the matters raised by the applicant and also a number of outside information documents reporting on political life in Bangladesh. This material established, as is well known, that political affairs in Bangladesh have a tendency to be turbulent, but at the same time it has an elected Parliament with a functioning opposition; it has courts, especially superior courts, which have not been hesitant in showing significant independence from the Government; and, perhaps not a little because of the political changes that seem to take place in Bangladesh on a relatively regular basis, the courts appear to have been able to trace a course through political upheaval to a reasonable level of independence and courage. There is also political freedom in Bangladesh in the sense that political parties are recognised, including opposition parties, and general franchise elections do take place in which candidates stand for Parliament and are openly supported by organisers, agents and party members. 10 The Tribunal came to the conclusion in the case that the applicant's level of involvement in the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party was significantly less than he claimed, and therefore that his position in the party and his relationship with his relative who was said to have a high position in another party was not a reason for him to seriously fear persecution, nor was it a reason which would objectively justify any such fear. 11 I have carefully read what the Tribunal has had to say in the light of the material submitted by the applicant. I have done so amongst other things in the context that the Court is always watchful that the rejection by an inquisitorial tribunal of factual allegations by applicants does need to be supported by some evidence and not be whimsical or based upon the personal opinion of the Tribunal member. In this case I can find no fault in the way in which the Tribunal approached its task, nor can I find any legal or other error in the conclusions which it drew from the material presented to it. Moreover, even if the whole of the applicant's claims had been accepted, the same result would have followed because, for the reasons I have given, there was no objective support for the applicant's claims of likely persecution on account of his political profile. 12 For those reasons the application for review will be dismissed.