TL;DR

A senior judge has found that the Home Office refused an asylum claim by citing a country policy information note that appears never to have existed. In a decision on 14 July, the upper tribunal judge said the refusal letter “bears hallmarks consistent with the use of artificial intelligence” and that the citation may be the result of an AI hallucination — which would be “an extremely serious failing” by the department.

The claimant is a Moroccan woman who fled with her child after a forced underage marriage and extreme violence including rape, fearing she would be killed by her husband, a previously convicted criminal. The Home Office refused her claim on the strength of a document it said confirmed Morocco would be safe for her. The document could not be located. A first-tier tribunal judge nonetheless relied on its existence in dismissing her appeal.

The upper tribunal was blunt: “It appears that no such CPIN has ever existed.” The judge added that the department’s own country policy and information team had been unable to confirm it existed, and that relying on a document that did not exist was “analogous to relying on bogus evidence”. He classed the issue as a procedural irregularity.

Pressed by the Guardian, the Home Office first supplied an archive link where the document could not be found, then produced something different: an unpublished piece of internal guidance. No country policy information note on Morocco has been published since 2017. The internal document was never disclosed to the court, and it does not conclude that Morocco is safe for the forcible return of women in the claimant’s position. It records that exemptions in 2018 permitted 40,000 child marriages — a fifth of all marriages that year — and that Moroccan law does not explicitly criminalise marital rape.

Looking Forward

The distinction that matters here is between a document that was wrong and a document that was never there. Verification of a citation is a clerical step, not a technical one, and it did not happen at either the decision stage or the first appeal. This is the second Home Office AI failure to surface in as many days, alongside warnings over the department’s facial age-estimation contract, and the pattern is procedural rather than algorithmic: tools are entering consequential decisions faster than the checks around them. The woman’s case continues.