Case No. UKUT-00627(IAC)

1. The respondent (hereafter the claimant) is a national of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). His appeal against a decision refusing to revoke a deportation order against him as a foreign criminal was allowed by First-tier Tribunal Judge Miles on Article 3 grounds in a decision sent on 19 September 2014. The appellant (hereafter the Secretary of State or SSHD) was granted permission to appeal. Despite being notified of the hearing of this appeal the claimant did not attend. Over an hour after the time fixed for the hearing (14.00 hours) Customer Services received a call saying the claimant would arrive in 20 minutes. He failed to arrive either within that time or later (a subsequent check revealed he had made no further contact or effort to explain his failure to attend). In such circumstances we decided to exercise our discretion to proceed with the hearing. We took into account that the claimant's representatives had submitted a “Rule 24 Response” so we were apprised of both sides of the argument. There is no challenge in this case to the dismissal by the FtT judge of his case based on his particular history and political profile. These were resoundingly rejected by the judge at [31] and [55] – [56]. The only basis on which the judge allowed the appeal was that he considered the claimant to be at risk on return simply because he was a criminal deportee: see [31] and [54]. 2. The reasons the judge gave for allowing the appeal on Article 3 ECHR grounds were essentially (1) that in