Case No. UKUT-00544-(IAC)

the Tribunal stated that: ‘42. We recognise that the threat to life or person of an individual need not come directly from armed conflict. It will suffice that the result of such conflict is a breakdown of law and order which has the effect of creating the necessary risk. It is obvious that the risk is most likely to result from indiscriminate bombings or shootings. These can properly be regarded as indiscriminate in the sense that, albeit they may have specific or general targets, they inevitably expose the ordinary civilian who happens to be at the scene to what has been described in argument as collateral damage. By specific targets, we refer to individuals or gatherings of individuals such as army or police officers. The means adopted may be bombs, which can affect others besides the target, or shootings, which produce a lesser but nonetheless real risk of collateral damage. By general targets we refer to more indiscriminate attacks on, for example, Sunnis or Shi’as or vice versa. Such attacks can involve explosions of bombs in crowded places such as markets or where religious processions or gatherings are taking place. 43. The CJEU requires us to decide whether the degree of indiscriminate violence characterising the armed conflict taking place reaches such a high level as to show the existence for an ordinary civilian of a real risk of serious harm in the country or in a particular region. When we refer below to the “Article 15(c) threshold”, this is what we have in mind. Thus it is necessary to assess whether the level of violence is such as to meet the test… 44. In HM1 at [73] the Tribunal decided that an attempt to distinguish between a real risk of targeted and incidental killing of civilians during armed conflict was not a helpful exercise. We agree, but in assessing whether the risk reaches the level required by the CJEU, focus on the evidence about the numbers of civilians killed or wounded is obviously of prime importance. Thus we have been told that each death can be multiplied up to seven times when considering injuries to bystanders. This is somewhat speculative and it must be obvious that the risk of what has been called collateral damage will differ depending on the nature of the killing. A bomb is likely to cause far greater “collateral damage” than an assassination by shooting. But the incidence and numbers of death are a helpful starting point. 45. The harm in question must be serious enough to merit medical treatment. It is not limited to physical harm and can include serious mental harm such as, for example, post-traumatic stress disorder. We repeat and adopt what the Tribunal said in HM1 at [80]: “In our judgment the nexus between the generalised armed conflict and the indiscriminate violence posing a real risk to life or person is met when the intensity of the conflict involves means of combat (whether permissible under the laws of war or not) that seriously endanger non-combatants as well as result in such a general breakdown of law and order as to permit anarchy and criminality occasioning the serious harm referred to in the Directive. Such violence is indiscriminate in effect even if not necessarily in aim. As the French Conseil d’Etat observed in Baskarathas , it is not necessary for the threat to life or person to derive from protagonists in the armed conflict in question: it can simply be a product of the breakdown of law and order.” ‘ “