JUDGMENT AND REASONS

I. Overview

[1] The Applicant seeks judicial review of a decision made by the Refugee Appeal Division [RAD] upholding the rejection of their refugee claim by the Refugee Protection Division [RPD] of the Immigration and Refugee Board [IRB].

[2] The Applicant is a citizen of Ethiopia. He made a claim for refugee protection in Canada for fear of returning to Ethiopia due to his imputed political opinion and Amhara ethnicity. The Applicant was raised in Adamma where he graduated from university in July 2019. While at university, he participated in an Amhara student group. The Applicant’s association with the student group ended after he graduated, but the group maintained his contact information, and texted him even after he graduated.

[3] The Applicant was detained by the authorities in October 2019 while he was in attendance at a church during an attack by the extremist Oromo group, Qeerroo. He alleges that while in detetion, his membership with the Amhara student group was raised as an issue. After his father paid a bribe, the Applicant was ultimately released with a weekly reporting condition.

[4] In January 2020, the Applicant alleges he was detained a second time during an Epiphany celebration because he wore an Amhara national flag cloth without the emblem, to express his solidarity with the Amhara. Again, he was released after his father paid a bribe. After this event, he left for Canada on a student visa and the authorities issued a summons against him.

[5] The RAD upheld the RPD’s credibility assessment and internal flight alternative [IFA] finding while it rejected some of RPD’s findings. The RAD accepted the following facts:

• a)That the Applicant’s ethnicity was Amhara. Yet, the RAD did not accept that the Applicant established a subjective fear of persecution by reasons of his ethnicity (RAD decision at para 32).

• b)That the police arrested the Applicant twice. The RAD found that the arrests were in the context of public disturbance (RAD decision at para 18).

• c)That the Applicant had attended the meetings of the Amhara student group, but that he was a casual attendee and not as a committed member or militant (RAD decision at para 19).

• d)That the Applicant sought medical assistance for injuries consistent with the alleged beatings at the hands of the police (RAD decision at para 12). Under section 110(4) of Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, SC 2001, c 27 [IRPA], the RAD accepted new medical documents that explained the RPD’s erroneous interpretation of “STI” as meaning sexually transmitted disease, as opposed to “soft tissue injury”.

• e)That the authorities issued a summons against him after he had left the country “on suspicion of an offence related to political unrest”, and that the summon was consistent with the police summons from Ethiopia. While the RAD found that his profile did not establish that he was an important militant that would attract the attention of the government as a whole, the RAD accepted that the evidence suggested that he “had less than a favourable reputation with the police” (RAD decision at paras 19 and 20).

II. Issues and Standard of Review

[6] The Applicant argues the RAD decision is unreasonable. The standard of review applicable to refugee determination decisions is reasonableness (Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65 (CanLII), [2019] 4 S.C.R. 653 at para 23 [Vavilov]; Singh v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2022 FC 1645 at para 13; Shah v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2022 FC 1741 at para 15). A reasonable decision is “one that is based on an internally coherent and rational chain of analysis and that is justified in relation to the facts and law that constrain the decision maker” (Vavilov at para 85). The reviewing court must ensure that the decision is justifiable, intelligible, and transparent (Vavilov at para 95). Justifiable and transparent decisions account for central issues and concerns raised in the parties’ submissions to the decision maker (Vavilov at para 127).

III. Analysis

A. Legal Framework: Credibility Findings

[7] There is generally a great degree of deference given to the credibility findings. Generally, this Court will not interfere with a decision, if the evidence before the Board, taken as a whole, would support the negative assessment of credibility, if its findings were reasonable in light of the evidence, and if reasonable inferences were drawn from that evidence (Tsigehana v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2020 FC 426 at paras 33–35).

[8] However, credibility assessment is a fact-finding exercise. The decision-maker can accept or reject the facts on a balance of probabilities. Facts that the decision-maker accepts or rejects are then linked to their rationally connected legal consequence. If the claimant’s testimony cannot be relied upon, and there is no independent evidence to corroborate the facts relevant to the claim, the decision-maker is left with insufficient credible evidence to find that the fact is established to support the claim. Therefore, the starting point is to understand and consistently use well-defined concepts such as credibility, probative value, relevance, materiality, weight and sufficiency. My colleague Justice Grammond has offered guidance on this in Magonza v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2019 FC 14 that I will not repeat here. Concisely, by understanding and using concepts related to accepting or rejecting evidence consistently, administrative decision-makers increase the likelihood of rendering reasonable decisions.

[9] When the decision-maker accepts certain material facts while they reject some others, it is important for the analysis to engage with both to explain how the evidence was weighed to support the ultimate conclusion.

[10] The formal rules of evidence, which make irrelevant or immaterial evidence inadmissible to a court proceeding, do not apply to an administrative tribunal such as the RAD. However, this does not mean that all facts, irrespective of their relevance, probative value or materiality, are created equal. Even though nearly all evidence is admitted at the RPD, and that new evidence before the RAD is subject to the restrictions in section 110(4) of the IRPA, relevance and materiality remain key to the weight of the evidence. Therefore, generally speaking, an exercise in making credibility assessment of individual facts, irrespective of how they matter in the context of the refugee case, in and of itself may not support an overall reasonable decision. This is because a decision where the member refers to all facts as equal, irrespective of their relevance and materiality in the context of the refugee claim, could lose the logical chain of reasoning contemplated by Vavilov:

[85] Developing an understanding of the reasoning that led to the administrative decision enables a reviewing court to assess whether the decision as a whole is reasonable. As we will explain in greater detail below, a reasonable decision is one that is based on an internally coherent and rational chain of analysis and that is justified in relation to the facts and law that constrain the decision maker. The reasonableness standard requires that a reviewing court defer to such a decision.

(emphasis added)

[11] Putting it differently, likening the situation to puzzle pieces, individual credibility findings represent fragments of evidence. Each piece might be accurate on its own, but without assembling and examining the complete puzzle, the overall picture – the comprehensive credibility assessment – may fail to reflect the true nature of the case. It underscores the necessity of a holistic approach to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the decision-making process. Without it, the chain of reasoning is lost and the reasons are no longer intelligible (Patel v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2024 FC 28 at para 24 [Patel]).

B. Was the RAD decision reasonable?

[12] At the first glance, the RAD appears to focus on material evidence and the decision appears to be reasonable. However, upon further scrutiny, it is clear that in reaching its decision, the RAD misapprehended or misconstrued the material evidence that resulted in a break in the chain of reasoning between the actual material evidence and the reasons. Most importantly, the RAD member examined each piece of the evidence in a vacuum without thinking of the interplay of the various pieces. Therefore, she failed to independently engage with the bigger picture, in the context of the unequivocal evidence it accepted. This led the RAD to not engage with the Applicant’s cumulative profile that fed into the perception of the Ethiopian authorities of him.

[13] For example, the RAD accepted that the Applicant was of Amhara ethnicity, who had also attended student group meetings. However, when the RPD invited the Applicant to speculate as to the reason for his arrest, he had stated that he did not think that his arrest was only because of his ethnicity. The Applicant had also stated that he had only attended some meetings at the student group, and the RAD found that he could not have been arrested as a militant. As the Respondent’s counsel also agreed at the judicial review hearing, at no time did the RAD engage with the perspective of the persecutor.

[14] From how the Applicant had speculated on the reasons for his arrest, the RAD concluded that the Applicant’s statement that he was not arrested only by reasons of his ethnicity, amounted to a lack of subjective fear.

[15] First, the Applicant was invited to speculate on his persecutor’s state of mind. The accuracy of the Applicant’s speculation on the state of mind of his persecutor has nothing to do with his actions or subjective fear, factors that affect his credibility.

[16] In addition, while the RAD accepted his Amhara ethnicity, based on finding him to lack credibility, it rejected that the Applicant’s ethnicity was the cause of his persecution. In short, the RAD accepted that: the Applicant was an Amhara; that he cared about the Amhara rights enough to wear their symbol when he was arrested; that he was arrested twice, not because of some grandiose student militant activism but because of his low-level attendance at the Amhara student group and the fact that he continued to be on their mailing list. Further, the RAD accepted that he faced reporting conditions, by which he did not abide, and that the authorities issued a summons that referred to political reasons against him, after his departure. These were the unequivocal facts that the RAD accepted, yet never explained how they were discounted. In light of the erroneous finding of subjective fear, and the individual assessment of each factor, without any attempt to see whether they would contribute to a cumulative profile that would trigger a serious possibility of persecution, the RAD lost a logical chain of reasoning.

[17] Moreover, the RAD accepted that the Applicant faced weekly reporting conditions. There is no question that he did not comply when he left the country. Yet, the RAD speculated that the police would likely not enforce the reporting condition and were probably not interested in him. It is hard to understand how the RAD reached this conclusion, especially in the context of the subsequent political summons issued against him, which the RAD also accepted.

[18] At the judicial review hearing, the Respondent’s counsel agreed that the RAD had dealt with each piece of evidence individually and argued that this was within their discretion as long as they dealt with each finding reasonably. I disagree that, generally speaking, interrelated facts can reasonably be dealt with in an airtight compartment, divorced from the larger context. As already stated, turning individual facts into a credibility assessment, irrespective of how they matter in the entire context of the refugee case, may not support an overall reasonable decision. This is tantamount to the earlier puzzle analogy where each piece might be accurate on its own, but without assembling and examining the complete puzzle, the overall picture – the comprehensive credibility assessment – may fail to reflect the true nature of the case. It underscores the necessity of a holistic approach to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the decision-making process. Without it, the chain of reasoning is lost and the reasons are no longer intelligible (Patel at para 24). The member appears to have been overly fixated on scrutinizing the individual piece of evidence without stepping back to consider the broader context or the overarching narrative. At no point did she consider the perspective of the persecutor in the process. All of this renders the decision as a whole unreasonable.

[19] The RAD did not explain why it preferred the facts it rejected – for example, the Applicant was not a militant within the student group, which is consistent with what the Applicant had consistently stated - than what it accepted, for example, the police released him on payment of bribe with reporting conditions by which he did not abide, and then he received subsequent political summons. This lack of analysis puts the Court in a position to speculate as to how and why the RAD reached its decision, which shows the reason’s lack of transparency and intelligibility.

[20] The RAD based its decision that the Applicant had a viable IFA, on the erroneous finding of subjective fear. The RAD had found that the Applicant lacked subjective fear because he had stated he did not think he was arrested solely because of his Amhara ethnicity. This was when he was invited to speculate to the state of mind of the persecutor, the accuracy of which would not affect subjective fear.

[21] Another reason for the availability of IFA was that the RAD speculated that even though the summons existed, the authorities would likely not enforce it for a persecutory purpose. Again, the conclusion that the authorities were not interested in the Applicant for a political reason is contradictory to not only the summons that had the word “political” in it, but it ignores the totality of the evidence, including facts unequivocally accepted by the RAD.

IV. Conclusion

[22] I find that the decision of the RAD was unreasonable. I, therefore, grant the judicial review.

[23] The parties did not propose a certified question and I agree that none arises.

JUDGMENT IN IMM-8131-23

THIS COURT’S JUDGMENT is that

FEDERAL COURT

SOLICITORS OF RECORD

APPEARANCES:

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