Date: 20150421

Docket: IMM-1792-12

Citation: 2015 FC 512

Toronto, Ontario, April 21, 2015

PRESENT:    The Honourable Mr. Justice Campbell

ORDER AND REASONS

[1]               With respect to the present Application, the Applicants are a family composed of a father, (the claimant), mother (the female claimant), and their dependent child, who are Roma citizens of the Czech Republic and who claim protection pursuant to s. 96 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, SC 2001, c 27, on the basis of their ethnicity, and protection pursuant to s. 97 on the basis of fear of right-wing racist extremists. In a decision dated February 3, 2012, the Refugee Protection Division (RPD) rejected the Applicants’ claim.

[2]               I find two reasons to set aside the RPD’s decision: a breach of a duty of fairness owed to the claimant, and a significant erroneous finding of fact.

I.                   Breach of a Duty of Fairness

[3]               A central finding in the RPD’s decision is a negative credibility finding based on a perceived discrepancy between the claimant’s statements in his PIF and his testimony at the hearing of his claim. The following emphasized passage from the decision is the finding:

There were some credibility concerns.  For example,  the  claimant  was  asked,  between  1999  and  November  2008,  how  many  times  he  was  attacked  by  skinheads;  he  replied  many  times.  Then he indicated  that he did  not  include all the  times  he  was  attacked.  Asked  if he  was  saying  that  they  [sic] were  other  attacks  by  skinheads  that  he  didn't  mention  his PIF  narrative  (instead  of  answering  the  question  directly),  he  replied,  ''What  I  wrote  down  is  what  I  wrote  down,  and  what  I  didn't,  I  didn't;  the  interpreter  I  had  we  just  put  in  what  we  had  time  to  put  in."  The  panel  finds  his  answer  to  what  was  simply  a  straightforward  question to be  evasive.

The  panel,  however,  repeated  the  question  to  which  the  claimant  replied, "Yes,"  He  was  then  asked  why  he  didn't  write  down all the  attacks against  him  in  his  PIF  narrative  (the  panel  notes  that  he  went  back  to  being  evasive);  he  replied,  "Whatever  we  wrote  down is  what  we  wrote  down."  But  later  he  added  that  ''Whatever  I  remembered  at  that  time  we wrote  down."  The claimant  was  asked  how  many  times  he  wrote  (in  his PIF  narrative)  that  he  was  attacked;  he  replied,  five  times.  The  panel  notes  that  his  PIF  narrative  indicates  that  he  was  attacked  seven  times.  Noting  that  in  his  oral  testimony  the  claimant  said  he  was  attacked  seven  times,  and  in  his  PIF  narrative  the  number  of times  he  was  attacked  amount  to  seven  times,  but  when  he  was  asked  how  many  times  he  wrote  in his PIF  narrative  that  he  was  attacked,  he  replied  five  times;  the  panel  did  not  pursue  an  adverse  credibility  finding  with  respect  to  that  discrepancy.  The  panel  believes  the  claimant  was  credible with  respect  to  the  number  of  times  he  stated  that  he  was  attacked  by  skinheads  in  his  PIF  narrative  which  largely  corresponded  with  the  number  of  times in his  oral  testimony.  However, the panel does  not  believe  that  he  was  indeed  attacked  and  assaulted  by  any  skinheads  at  any  time,  particularly  as  he  now  claimed  that  he  was  assaulted  more  times  than  he  wrote  in  his  PIF  narrative. If indeed  he  was  attacked  by  skinheads  as  he  stated,  especially  more  than  the  seven  times  over  the nine  year  period  (1999-2008)  indicated  in  his  Personal Information  Form (PIF)  narrative, on  a  balance  of  probabilities,  he  would  not  have  been  evasive  in  his  response  to  the  question  when  he was  asked  "if he  was  saying  that  they [sic] were  other  attacks  by  skinheads  that  he  didn't  mention  his PIF  narrative."  He would  have  simply  answered  the  question directly. Therefore, the panel  finds his  evasiveness  to  undermine  his  credibility  and  rejects  his  allegation  that  he  was  ever  attacked  by  skinheads  in  his  country.

[Emphasis added and footnotes in the original omitted]

(Decision, paras. 9 and 10)

[4]               During the course of the hearing, out of fairness to the record, Counsel for the Respondent drew my attention to the following critical passage from the transcript of the hearing before the RPD:

COUNSEL:   Mr. Board Member at the last sitting there were a number of questions, how many times you were attacked, how many times did you go to the police and so forth, like that. Does…I just want to focus my questioning…does the Board have any significant issues in terms of the claimant’s recounting of the number of times he was attacked, the number of times he went to the police or anything of that nature or is that evidence, whether identical to the [PIF], close enough that there is not serious credibility concerns?

MEMBER:    There is no…I can go on record and tell you that there is no real..I..I was reviewing the evidence in preparation for today and when I..I..I was going through it I am realizing that there is no serious discrepancy. When I count the amount of incidents there were about nine and he said seven, but…but I..I do not see that as…as the number of times. There might be issues around some of the information he provided in regards to the..the..the incidents, but I, going through it I did not foresee a problem with how many times he said he was assaulted or his relatives were assaulted. And I do not think it would be fair for me to use that to…even if there were some slight discrepancy there, because he is saying that he was assaulted but also his relatives were assaulted.

[Emphasis added]

(Certified Tribunal Record at p. 680)

[5]               The breach of the duty of fairness owed to the claimant is the RPD’s commitment made during the course of the hearing, which had the potential of limiting evidence and argument in support of the claimant’s claim, and the subsequent breach of the commitment, by making a finding which is used to reject the claimant’s claim.

II.                Erroneous Finding of Fact

[6]               In the decision, the RPD used documented general descriptions of practices and procedures in the Czech Republic to find, as a fact, that those practices and procedures were actually applied in the scenario at hand without a shred of evidence to support the finding. In the following paragraphs of the decision, the RPD finds that, because police are required to respond to a complaint, it is implausible that the police did not respond to the Applicant’s complaint:

In addition, the panel  also  notes  that  the  claimant  testified  that  despite  making  several complaints  to  the  police - at  least  three  times  by  telephone  and  two  times in person  at  the  police  station - yet  he  received  no  assistance  from  the  police.  The panel  does  not  believe  that  if he  was attacked  these [sic] many  times  by  skinheads  and  made  these  several  reports  to  the  police,  he  would  not  have  received  some  form of  assistance.  The  panel prefers  the documentary  evidence over  the claimant's testimony  since  they  are  drawn  from  a  wide range  of  publicly  accessible documents from reliable  non-government  and  government  organizations  which  states  that  by  law,  police must  respond  to  all  distress  calls  and  notify  parties  of the  outcome  of  their  complaints. […]

[Emphasis added]

(Decision, para. 11)

III.             Conclusion

[7]               Given the breach of fairness, and the erroneous finding of fact, I find that the decision is made in reviewable error.

[8]               Independent from the findings made with respect to the content of the decision, I have an obiter comment to make regarding the process used by the RPD to make implausibility findings.

[9]               The RPD begins its analysis of the Applicants’ claim by making the following statements of law regarding implausibility findings:

With regard to credibility, the  panel  is  guided  by  the  Federal  Court  of  Appeal  which has ruled  that  testimony  given  under  oath  is  presumed  to  be  true,  unless  there  is  a  valid  reason  to  doubt  its  truthfulness. The  assessment  the  panel  must  use  to  test  the  truth  of  a  story  of  a  witness  is  that  it  be  in  harmony  with  the  preponderance  of  probabilities  which  a practical  and  informed  person  would  readily  recognize  as  reasonable  in  that  place  and  in  those  conditions. Furthermore, the  panel  cannot  be  satisfied  that,  “the  evidence  is  credible  or  trustworthy  unless  satisfied  that  it  is  probably  so,  not  just  possibly  so”. [Faryna v Chorny, [1952] 2 D.L.R. 354 (B.C.C.A.) at 357, per O’Halloran, J.A.)

[…] The  panel  is  entitled  to  make  reasonable  findings  based  on implausibility,  common  sense  and  rationality,  and  may  reject  evidence  if it  is  not  consistent  with  the  probabilities  affecting  the  case  as  a  whole.

The RPD’s statements do not fully reflect the now long-standing accepted approach to the making of implausibility findings as stated in the decision of Valtchev v Canada (MCI), 2001 FCT 776 at paragraph 7 as follows:

A tribunal may make adverse findings of credibility based on the implausibility of an applicant's story provided the inferences drawn can be reasonably said to exist. However, plausibility findings should be made only in the clearest of cases, i.e., if the facts as presented are outside the realm of what could reasonably be expected, or where the documentary evidence demonstrates that the events could not have happened in the manner asserted by the claimant. A tribunal must be careful when rendering a decision based on a lack of plausibility because refugee claimants come from diverse cultures, and actions which appear implausible when judged from Canadian standards might be plausible when considered from within the claimant's milieu.

[see L. Waldman, Immigration Law and Practice (Markham, ON: Butterworths, 1992) at 8.22]

[10]           While the RPD’s quote from the decision in Faryna v. Chorny does speak to the need for a decision-maker to be objectively “informed”, the present evidentiary standard makes more precise demands. To avoid the application of speculation, implausibility findings must be made on the basis of evidence on the record through a process of fact finding which produces verifiable results. This point is expressed in the decision in Zakhour v Canada (MCI), 2011 FC 1178 at paragraph 5:

Therefore, in the present case, from evidence on the record, the RPD was required to: first, clearly find what might reasonably be expected by way of a Hezbollah response to the Applicant’s actions; then make findings of fact about the response that was made by Hezbollah; and, finally, conclude whether the response conforms with what might be reasonably suspected. In the present case this process of critical analysis was not followed. On this basis I find that the RPD’s implausibility findings are unsupported speculations, and, therefore, the decision under review is not defensible on the law and the facts.

ORDER

THIS COURT ORDERS that the decision under review is set aside and the matter is referred back to a differently constituted panel for redetermination.

There is no question to certify.

"Douglas R. Campbell"

FEDERAL COURT

SOLICITORS OF RECORD

APPEARANCES:

SOLICITORS OF RECORD: