Mr. Justice Zinn has handed down a very clear decision accepting the claimant’s application for Judicial Review.   The Court concluded that the Board’s decision was wholly based on a misinterpretation of the CHN42444.  Mr. Justice Zinn noted that unlike some of the other cases dealing with the issue of summonses, in the present case the sample summonses were attached and part of the Record.  As a result it was possible to determine that the Board had completely misapprehended the evidence.

Over the course of the past number of years there has been a whole line of cases which have dealt with the question of summonses issued by the police in China.  In particular some panels have pointed to Information Request CHN42444 which until recently was included in the Board’s National Documentation Package (NDP), and interpreted this document to suggest that summonses have a very precise form which they generally conclude is not the form produced by the claimant.

While on its face this is a very narrow question of fact, there are some general principals at play.  First, whether a CHN report from 2004 is stale dated and second, what weight such reports ought to hold.

It is noteworthy that the Board, in it’s most recent National Documentation Package for China, has removed CHN 42444 and replaced it with item 9.3 which is a much more cautiously worded document and much less susceptible to the kind of misinterpretation Board Members were routinely applying to CHN42444.