Case No. UKUT-00376-(IAC)

appeal against the respondent’s refusal to grant her claim for asylum. 2. The appellant is an Iranian citizen. She held a senior role in a women’s prison under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in which political prisoners were detained and tortured. In 2009 she, her husband and her young child left Iran clandestinely with the help of an agent. Having become separated from her husband, the appellant arrived in the United Kingdom with her child in September 2009 and claimed asylum. It transpired that her husband had made his way to Turkey but had been forcibly returned from there to Iran , where he was detained and tortured over a period of months. On his release he subsequently made his way to the United Kingdom , arriving in December 2010, when he too claimed asylum. 3. The respondent refused each of the applications, giving reasons for doing so in the appellant’s case by letter dated 2 October 2012. In that letter the respondent explained her conclusion that the appellant was to be excluded from the protection of the Refugee Convention upon the grounds set out in a rticle 1F(a), namely that there were serious grounds for considering that she had committed a crime against humanity, and her consequential certification under section 55 of the Immigration Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 that she was not entitled to the protection of a rticle 33 paragraph 1 of the Refugee Convention. For the same reasons she concluded that the appellant did not qualify for protection under the Qualification Directive. The appellant, her child and her husband all appealed against the respondent’s decisions and their linked cases were heard together before the First-tier Tribunal on 28 April 2014. 4. In its determination , the First-tier Tribunal upheld the respondent’s decision to exclude the appellant from protection under the Refugee Convention and the Qualification Directive and in doing so rejected the appellant’s claim that she was excluded from criminal responsibility on account of having acted under duress. However, by concession it allowed the appellant’s appeal on human rights grounds on the basis that she would be at real risk of ill treatment on return to Iran . The appeals of the appellant’s husband and her child were each allowed on both asylum and human rights grounds. 5. After permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal was refused the appellant sought Judicial Review, which was granted with the following observations: “The Grounds for seeking Judicial Review are reasonably arguable. Furthermore, a point of principle of general importance is at issue, namely the proper burden of proof when an applicant for refugee status claims that she should not be re garded as complicit in a crime against humanity because of duress (and, more specifically, whether it is for her to show that she could not have avoided the duress by , for instance, resigning from her post, or whether it is for the SSHD to show that this was a course that had been open to her).” 6. By determination dated 19 December 2015, Deputy Upper Tribunal Judge Chamberlain held that the decision of the First-tier Tribunal involved the making of an error on a point of law, as its finding that the appellant could have left the prison service “without serious difficulty” was inadequately reasoned and not supported by evidence before it. The decision on the appellant’s appeal was ordered to be remade with the original findings and decision in relation to exclusion from protection under the Refugee Convention and the Qualification Directive (paragraphs [55] to [65]) being set aside. The remaining findings and decisions of the First-tier Tribunal were preserved. The h istory of the a ppellant’s i