UTIAC 1. When preparing medico-legal reports doctors should not – and should not feel obliged to – reach conclusions about causation of scarring which go beyond their own clinical expertise.
2. Doctors preparing medico-legal reports for asylum seekers must consider all possible causes of scarring.
3. Where there is a presenting feature of the case that raises self-infliction by proxy (SIBP) as a more than fanciful possibility of the explanation for scarring:-
(i) a medical report adduced on behalf of a claimant will be expected to engage with that issue; it cannot eliminate a priori or routinely the possibility of SIBP; and
(ii) a judicial fact-finder will be expected to address the matter, compatibly with procedural fairness, in deciding whether, on all the evidence, the claimant has discharged the burden of proving that he or she was reasonably likely to have been scarred by torturers against his or her will.
4. A lack of correlation between a claimant’s account and what is revealed by a medical examination of the scarring may enable a medico-legal report to shed some clinical light on the issue of whether SIBP is a real possibility.
5. Whilst the medical literature continues to consider that scarring cannot be dated beyond 6 months from when it was inflicted, there is some medical basis for considering in relation to certain types of cases that its age can be determined up to 2 years.
6. Whilst if best practice is followed medico-legal reports will make a critical evaluation of a claimant’s account of scarring said to have been caused by torture, such reports cannot be equated with an assessment to be undertaken by decision-makers in a legal context in which the burden of proof rests on the claimant and when one of the purposes of questioning is to test a claimant’s evidence so as to decide whether (to the lower standard) it is credible.
Storey, Dawson, Kopieczek UTJJ
[2014] UKUT 230 (IAC)
Bailii
England and Wales
Cited by:
Appeal From – KV (Sri Lanka) v Secretary of State for The Home Department CA 7-Mar-2017
The appellant sought asylum, claiming that he had been tortured as an ally of the Tamil Tigers. His claims had been disbelieved. . .
At UT – KV (Sri Lanka) v Secretary of State for The Home Department SC 6-Mar-2019
The claimant said that he had been tortured in Sri Lanka. The SSHD said the injuries were falsifications, inflicted at the claimant’s request.
Held: KV’s appeal succeeded, and the case was remitted for a fresh determination. The Istanbul . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Immigration, Evidence
Updated: 16 January 2022; Ref: scu.534244