A. AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT
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31. The first applicant and his representatives were served with the
Secretary of State’s “open” material, including a police report which
showed that large sums of money had moved through the four bank
accounts in his name. SIAC and the special advocate instructed on behalf of
the first applicant were in addition presented with “closed” evidence.
Assisted by an interpreter, the first applicant gave oral evidence to SIAC
and called one witness to testify to his good character. He also filed four
medical reports concerning his mental health. SIAC observed in its
judgment of 29 October 2003:
“We are acutely aware that the open material relied on against the Applicant is very
general and that the case depends in the main upon assertions which are largely
unsupported. The central allegation is that he has been involved in fund-raising and
distribution of those funds for terrorist groups with links to al-Qaeda. It is also said
that he has procured false documents and helped facilitate the movement of jihad
volunteers to training camps in Afghanistan. He is said to be closely involved with
senior extremists and associates of Osama Bin Laden both in the United Kingdom and
overseas. His case is and always has been that he is concerned and concerned only
with welfare projects, in particular a school in Afghanistan for the children of Arab
speakers there and projects such as construction of wells and provision of food to
communities in Afghanistan. He has also raised money for refugees from Chechnya.
Any contact with so-called extremists has been in that context and he had no reason to
believe they were terrorists or were interested in terrorism.
We recognise the real difficulties that the Appellant has in making this appeal. We
have made appropriate allowance for those difficulties and his mental problems. We
note [his counsel’s] concerns that there has been gross oversimplification by the
Security Service of the situation which is, he submits, highly complex and a tendency
to assume that any devout Muslim who believed that the way of life practised by the
Taliban in Afghanistan was the true way to follow must be suspect. We note, too, that
initially the Respondent asserted that all the Appellant’s fund-raising activities were
for the purpose of assisting terrorism and that it was only when evidence was
produced by the Appellant to show that there were legitimate charitable objectives
that he accepted that at least some money was raised for those purposes. In so far as
connections with named individuals are relied on, we bear in mind that some of them,
who are alleged to be involved in terrorism, have appeals pending ... and that
allegations against others have not been tested nor have alleged links been able to be
explained.
...
[The first applicant’s counsel] accepted, as he had to, the unreliability of the
Applicant’s evidence about his movements in the 1990s, but asked us not to hold it
against him because of his mental state. We do not accept that we can do that. The lies
were a deliberate attempt to rebut the allegation that he had been a mujahid in
Afghanistan, saying that he spent three years in a Jordanian prison. There was an
overstatement by the police of the amount involved through the bank account. This we
accept, but there was still a substantial sum of money going through them. And [the
applicant’s counsel] submitted that the allegation was that he had provided false
documents for others not for himself. Thus his false Iraq passport was not material. It
does however show an ability to obtain a false passport. [The applicant’s counsel]