The applicant was refused asylum at first instance and appealed to the Appeals Authority. At the appeal he gave evidence of his claimed experience of arrest, imprisonment and subjection to torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment in Sierra Leone and argued that such treatment occurred by reason of political activity and membership of a social group. The Appeals Authority found inter alia that the applicant lacked credibility and also that he had not satisfied the standard of proof of a “reasonable likelihood of persecution”. The Applicant argued inter alia that the correct standard of proof was not “a reasonable likelihood” but a lesser standard.
The Court was satisfied that the test applied by the Appeals Authority that there must be a “reasonable likelihood” of persecution accorded with the test applied by the House of Lords in R v Secretary of State for the Home Department ex parte Sivakumaran [1988] Imm AR 147 where Lord Keith of Kinkel spoke of the need for an applicant to demonstrate “a reasonable degree of likelihood that he would be persecuted for a conventional reason if returned to his own country”.
