AC-2025-LON-003558 - [2025] EWHC 2688 (Admin)

I was not able to accept these submissions. My view, with the benefit of the submissions from both sides and having considered the documents, was that the claim did not cross the threshold of arguability. My view was that there was no realistic prospect of success in overturning the adverse decision of 6 October 2025. That was fatal to the claim.

I can start with the physical examination point. The point was made, within the gatekeeper’s decision letter, that the Claimant’s complaint in his email request was that he was “not able to show” his marks or stamps on his body to the medical professional at the time the rule 35 examination. That is what the Claimant’s email request had said. The decision-maker pointed out that the Claimant had provided no “explanation” as to why he did not “present this to the professional at the time”. In my judgment, the decision-maker was plainly entitled to make that point and to reach an adverse view based on it. The Claimant was not saying that he was not examined. He was not saying “no scars noted” in the report was because no examination was done. He was saying, for some unexplained reason, that he was “not able to show” the clinician the marks on his body. The recent events in detention with video arrangement cannot, in my judgment, assist if the impugned decision is, beyond argument, a lawful one. So far as the solicitors letter of 2 October 2025 is concerned, I note that that letter refers to the rule 35 report although it gives an incorrect date. But no point is made about any failure of examination. And consideration of the rule 35 report itself does not assist the Claimant. In my judgment it clearly undermines the claim. I am unable to see how the judicial review Court would read the rule 35 report as reflecting a clinician not bothering to make any observation or examination of the Claimant physically; still less of the gatekeeper as acting unreasonably in failing to read it in that way. The process was a medical examination. The report form which the clinician was filling out states that the clinician needed to give details of observations and findings which should include details of all scarring or other physical marks. To record “no scars noted” clearly indicates that the examining clinician looked and could not see any. It does not record that the examining clinician did not look.

I remind myself that judicial review is not a merits appeal afresh. The Court does not have a substitutionary jurisdiction. I am aware of the potential rigours of the reasonableness standard of review in an anxious scrutiny context. I am aware of the contours of material error of fact in public law, and of obviously material considerations, and also of legally adequate reasons. I could see no arguable public law error in relation to physical examination.

I turn to the point made about the Claimant’s narrative. The starting point is that there was a detailed narrative at the time of induction that was recorded and captured for the purpose of the online referral form. At one point Mr Lee made a point about dialect and the interpreter. But he subsequently very fairly recognised that this was the wrong way round. The dialect of the interpreter for the induction was the one which the Claimant has accepted was the right one for him. Another point which Mr Lee referred to was about how late at night it had been when the Claimant had been encountered for his screening. But it is the induction narrative at the detention centre that is the basis of the description of the restaurant in Libya where the Claimant was saying that he had worked and sometimes been unpaid. That was then addressed in the original adverse reasonable grounds decision of 3 September 2025. That was the “recorded account” to which the gatekeeper later referred.

Against that backcloth there was then the Claimant’s email. The point that the gatekeeper decision-maker was making was by reference to that request. The Claimant was saying in his request that there were details attributable to him that he had not said and timelines that didn’t accurately reflect his personal chronology. And that was all he said. He had not taken the opportunity to set out his missing alternative narrative, or to explain what it was that he had actually said in the induction, which was misrecorded. The gatekeeper regarded this as a plain and obvious failure. There is nothing arguably unreasonable or unlawful in making this powerful point. Indeed, the Claimant’s same email request had said this: “I am committed to providing a full and accurate account of my experiences”. The point is that he did not do so. He provided nothing at all. There was no identification of any point. That was the point being made.

I was unable to accept that the other materials, on which reliance is placed, support an arguable case for a finding by the Court of a material error of fact or of an obviously relevant consideration being overlooked. As Ms Anderson for the SSHD pointed out in her submissions they simply introduced yet further contradictions. Nor is it arguable in my judgment that the reasons were legally inadequate because they did not deal specifically with those further materials. They are referenced by the gatekeeper and they had been considered. In fact, when I look at the rule 35 report the Claimant had said to the examining clinician that he had been forced to work in a “warehouse” in Libya and had been beaten and “hung upside down”. The solicitors letter of 2 October 2025 had made some general references to forced labour involving work in the “desert” and beatings. But there was no reference to a “warehouse” and no reference to being “hung upside down”. The letter had even referred to a rule 35 report (giving it a different date) and the Claimant’s “narration of events” as requiring further detailed consideration. They stand alongside what the decision-maker – beyond argument – reasonably regarded as the deafening silence in the email request.

I was unable to see a realistic prospect of overturning the adverse gatekeeper decision as unreasonable or based on material error of fact or disregarding an obviously material consideration or being legally inadequately reasoned, even on an anxious scrutiny.

It was in those circumstances, and for those reasons, that I accepted the submissions of Ms Anderson for the SSHD. I could not see a realistic prospect of the judicial review Court at a substantive hearing accepting that there was any vitiating public law error in the adverse decision. As I said in my ruling and in stating my conclusions at the Teams hearing, since the claim lacked legal viability and raised no triable issue, I refused interim relief and at the same time refused permission for judicial review.