Federal Court rules immigration officer’s analysis was “largely copied verbatim” from the first refusal by a colleague.

The Federal Court has quashed the refusal of an Afghan immigration applicant because the officer’s analysis was “largely copied verbatim” from the first refusal by another colleague against the same man.

In sending the case back to the Immigration Department for a new assessment, Judge Darren R. Thorne ruled that it was procedurally unfair for the officer to refuse the humanitarian and compassionate resettlement application of Atiqullah Lali, who lives without status in Turkey and faces deportation to Afghanistan.

“Much of the analysis is largely copied verbatim, with effectively identical wording, with some minimal cosmetic edits,” the judge wrote in the ruling released on Friday.

“I am not satisfied that a reasonable person apprised of the circumstances would conclude that the officer turned their mind to the evidence and the issues and rendered an impartial, independent decision.”

Lali, 30, said he fled from Afghanistan to Turkey in August 2021 to escape persecution by the Taliban, which threatened to forcibly recruit him as punishment for the women’s rights activism of his father and sister. He lived in Istanbul as an undocumented migrant while awaiting the processing of his resettlement to Canada.

His immigration application to Canada was first refused in May 2024 because he did not provide the “refugee status determination” document issued by the Turkish government or the United Nations Refugee Agency that certified him as a refugee.

Canada rejected his immigration application twice. He’s challenging the decision in court over its ‘copied and pasted’ refusal

He had requested an exemption from that requirement because Turkey doesn’t allow the UN agency to provide refugee certificates in the country and it would put him at risk of detention and deportation to Afghanistan if he came forward. The officer rejected his request.

A second refusal was issued April 2025 despite updates by Lali following his arrest and detention by Turkish police the year before. He is currently subject to an enforceable Turkish deportation order to send him back to Afghanistan. The court heard his appeal in August.

“Essentially all of the decision-making analysis in the decision has clearly been directly copied from the earlier decision,” wrote Thorne.

The court also rejected the government’s argument that any editing of the language of the first refusal by the second officer was an indication that there was a fresh assessment of the case.

“It is fair to say that the respondent struggled to provide examples of any such meaningful edits when asked, ultimately identifying only the addition of a date in one section of the decision, and elsewhere the addition of the word ‘indeed,’ prior to an otherwise verbatim replicated paragraph,” Thorne noted.

The judge agreed with the government that when an officer is faced with almost exactly the same submissions under the same legislative and policy constraints, the reasoning and decisions would look similar. However, he also pointed out that the second officer did not address any of the information and arguments updated in Lali’s file, indicating “a lack of engagement with those matters.”

The court ordered the Immigration Department assign Lali’s case to a new officer and make a new decision within 45 days, given the urgency of the matter.

Lali’s co-counsel Andrew Koltun said his client and his sponsors in Canada were grateful for the court ruling, which “vindicates” their views of the officer’s failure to reconsider the case by using mostly “copied-and-pasted material” from the reasons for the first refusal.

Court quashes Canadian ‘copy and paste’ immigration refusal of Afghan man