AC-2025-LON-001440 - [2025] EWHC 2472 (Admin)

Ground 4 asserts that the defendant failed to take reasonable steps to acquaint himself with the information necessary to reach a correct decision: Secretary of State for Educaton and Science vTameside MBC [1977] AC 1014. A Tameside challenge is a species of rationality challenge. The bar for success is therefore set high.

The claimant submits that, since the defendant considered it relevant to know which arm of the coalition forces in Afghanistan had arrested an alleged terrorist, who was subsequently tried by the claimant in a panel of the ATC, it was for the defendant to make the necessary inquiries on this matter. The claimant could not be expected to provide such information. As I have explained, I do not consider that it was rational for the defendant to require that British forces be the ones to make the arrest, before the claimant’s judicial contribution to the trial and sentencing process could be taken into consideration. If, however, I am wrong about that, then I agree with the claimant that this is something that could and should have been investigated by the defendant. In the absence of such investigation, the point could not rationally be taken against the claimant.

Mr Ó Ceallaigh also submitted that the defendant had irrationally failed to investigate what the basis was for categorising certain ATC cases as being of special interest to the FCDO, thereby possibly putting the judges hearing these cases into what the defendant considered to be an actual or potential position of partnership with that department. As I have endeavoured to explain under Ground 1, I consider that this issue is more appropriately seen as part of the wider failure of the defendant to adduce evidence which shows there is a rational basis for the assertions regarding “partnership judges”. This court can only procced on the evidence that the parties have seen fit to adduce.

It may be that an evidential case can hereafter be made by the defendant that: (a) there was never an institutional relationship between the FCDO and the ATC, of such a kind that a judge of the ATC would thereby be in partnership etc with the FCDO by reason of their work as such a judge; and (b) that the only judges who can objectively be said to have been in partnership were a properly identifiable cohort of “partnership judges.” Any such evidential case would still have to be compatible with the holistic approach which the Court of Appeal implicitly endorsed in LND1.

Ground 4 succeeds to the extent explained in paragraph 89 above.