[2024] UKUT 440 (AAC)

On 17 May 2023 the UT granted permission to appeal. The key issue for the appeal was JC’s knowledge of NR’s age when they had intercourse. The UT expressed some doubt in respect of JC’s appeal. At para 5 it stated:

“There are a number of reasons as to why it might be thought the appellant’s prospects of success on appeal, if permission were to be given, would be weak. I am currently finding it hard to understand why, if things did not happen in the way NR has described, she would not only say that they had but take the trouble to report matters to the police with a view to a prosecution and all that such would entail for her. If she is lying, she has invented a quite detailed account involving three claimed sexual encounters. There was opportunity for her to have met the appellant either at the school she was attending or at the centre given the nature of his work and it appears that had they done so, that would have alerted the applicant to NR’s young age. The statement of PM might also be regarded as affording some corroborative support to NR’s account regarding not only the fact of the sexual activity but as to her claim that he knew she was only 15 at the time. Further, whilst the appellant asserts that he met NR as a result of her telephoning him on a number of occasions, that she presented as being an 18-year-old who herself worked with children, and that the impetus for sexual interaction came from her (he told me at the permission hearing she had expressly invited him round for sex), all of that, on one view, might seem implausibly bold for a 15-year-old.”

Given the low threshold for the granting of permission, JC’s consistent denials and the existence of the letter from NR of June 1998 which might on one reading support JC’s case permission to appeal was granted.

This appeal concerns events that all took place in 1998 although the barring decision was not made until 2022, some 24 years later.