The applicant, Iraqi national, applied for international protection on grounds related to conversion to Christianity but the Finnish Immigration Service rejected the application and ordered the return to his country of origin. The decision was confirmed in appeal and the Supreme Administrative Court dismissed a leave to appeal.
He further submitted a subsequent application, based on same grounds related to conversion but the FIS rejected it for lack of new elements.
In the appeal before the Supreme Administrative Court, the applicant argued that previous decisions were erroneous, due to issues with the interpretation. The applicant alleged to have had a partial understanding of the oral hearing which was held in Kurdish soranese as language of interpretation, because his mother tongue is bahdini. The Administrative Court rejected the appeal.
The appellant pointed out before the Administrative Court, inter alia, that the matters raised in the new application had been assessed solely on the basis of previous erroneous decisions. The appellant, whose mother tongue was badini, had only a partial understanding of the Kurdish soranese used as the language of interpretation in the oral hearing before the administrative court. The Administrative Court dismissed the appeal by decision of 31 July 2020.
The applicant further appealed and submitted before the Supreme Administratuve Court a statement from the Bahdin language interpreter and underlined that the interpreter of the administrative court during the hearing did not know any Bahdin language. Based on the accent, the interpreter appeared to be an Iranian Kurdish who spoke soranese. According to the statement, there had been shortcomings in interpreting from Finnish to Badin as well as when interpreting from Badin to Finnish. The interpreter had sometimes added things to the interpretation, sometimes left the parts uninterpreted, or misinterpreted. According to the statement, the consistency of the applicant’s responses had been severely affected by the interpretation.
The Supreme Administrative Court granted leave to appeal and also ex officio annulled all previous decisions from the Administrative Court and the Finnish Immigration Service and referred the case back to the Administrative Court for a new oral hearing.
The Supreme Administrative Court held that when it came to assessing a person's religious beliefs based on a person's own account, the accuracy of the person's own expression and the transmission of individual nuances are significant and important. The court then had to make sure that the interpretation was sufficiently professional for the terms used by the person being heard to be understood correctly. In addition, the applicant to be heard had to be able to understand the questions addressed to him. The primary aim is to use the mother tongue of the person or, alternatively, another language in which the person can be correctly understood.
When conducting an oral hearing that requires using interpretation, the court has to pay particular attention to the fact that the person being heard also shall fell that he or she had been understood. In addition, attention had to be paid to anything that may arise during the interpretation and which might make it necessary to ensure that the interpretation was appropriate. This may be the case, for example, because the applicant’s answers appeared to be out of context, or because discussions or expressions between the interpreter and the applicant revealed that either or both did not understand each other or based on the interpreter's own assessment it results that he or she had difficulty to understand or to translate questions understandably.
The Supreme Administrative Court noted from the records of the oral hearing that the interpreter had indicated on his own initiative during that he was not performing sufficiently due to a language barrier and that it might therefore be necessary to change the interpreter. The interpreter had also stated that he had no previous experience of interpreting in court. The interpreter had feared that there would be misunderstandings in the interpretation of the speech on spiritual matters.
Taking into account the written statement of the Bahdin interpreter on the oral hearing of the administrative court and the record of the oral hearing of the administrative court, the Supreme Administrative Court had also been able to assess the applicant’s report, which was translated into Finnish, and thus to review the administrative court's assessment of credibility. The Supreme Administrative Court found that there had been a procedural error in the oral proceedings before the Administrative Court concerning interpretation and consulted also the ECtHR findings in the case of Vizgirda v. Slovenia, 28 August 2018.