ANA16 v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection

1. The appeal be dismissed.
2. The appellant pay the costs of the first respondent. Note: Entry of orders is dealt with in Rule 39.32 of the Federal Court Rules 2011.

JESSUP J: 1 This is an appeal from a judgment of the Federal Circuit Court of Australia delivered on 3 November 2016 in which an application for judicial review of a decision of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal given on 19 February 2016 was dismissed. In that decision, the Tribunal affirmed an earlier decision of a delegate of the respondent Minister not to grant the applicant a protection visa under the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) ("the Act"). 2 The terms in which the appellant has articulated his jurisdictional complaints against the Tribunal have been, and remain, diverse, high-level and nonspecific. The primary Judge found some difficulty identifying what the appellant's grounds of challenge to the Tribunal's decision were, but did so in the following terms: [F]irst that the Tribunal took into account irrelevant considerations; secondly, that the Tribunal was unreasonable to conclude that all documents from Bangladesh were fraudulent; thirdly, that the Tribunal asked irrelevant questions in order to confuse and discredit the applicant's oral and written evidence; fourthly, that the Tribunal did not properly apply the test for persecution. 3 In a concise but adequate statement of reasons, his Honour dealt with each of these grounds, and the way in which he did so were not the subject of any focussed challenge by the appellant in this proceeding. I accept that he is self-represented, and, as many such litigants, he finds it a challenging task to marshal his arguments and propositions in a way that would lead to a useful outcome in a court. However, those difficulties do not change the nature of the task on which the court is engaged. This is a court of appeal, that is to say, a court whose function is the correction of error. It is not for this court, at least in the absence of a special case made out, to deal with a series of claims made as they would be in a court of first instance jurisdiction. 4 Whatever else may be said of the appellant's case in this court, it has gone nowhere near identifying error in the reasons of the Federal Circuit Court. The terms in which the appellant expressed his grounds of appeal are high-level and general ones, and realistically provide the court with no concrete indication of the respects in which he would contend that the Federal Circuit Court was in error. When he appeared before me today, he handed up a written argument of slightly more than two pages on the merits, which appears to have little or no relation to the grounds of appeal upon which the proceeding is based. Further, some of the propositions made in point form in that outline ought not to have been made in the absence of particulars, and certainly not in the absence of an established factual foundation in the proceeding at first instance. I refer to the propositions that the Tribunal did not act in good faith and was biased against him. 5 It is hard to resist the conclusion that the arguments contained in this outline were in the nature of a shopping list of legal and jurisdictional points as the appellant may have become aware of from various sources, but which bear almost no relationship to the task which confronted him today, that is to say, the demonstration of error in the primary Judge's disposition of his application for jurisdictional review. 6 Having considered the reasons of the primary Judge, and assisted by the well-organised outline upon which the respondent Minister relied and to which his counsel spoke today, I have reached the conclusion that the appeal should be dismissed. I certify that the preceding six (6) numbered paragraphs are a true copy of the Reasons for Judgment herein of the Honourable Justice Jessup.