CAT/C/59/D/649/2015 obligations under the Convention. Under section 36 (2) (aa) of the Migration Act 1958, the decision maker must be satisfied that there are substantial grounds for believing that, as a necessary and foreseeable consequence of a non-citizen’s removal from Australia, there is a real risk that the non-citizen will suffer significant harm. The decision maker concluded that the complainant did not face a real risk of significant harm should he be returned to Sri Lanka. Having concluded that the complainant was not owed complementary protection obligations under section 36 (2) (aa) of the Migration Act 1958, the decision maker refused the complainant’s protection visa application. 4.10 The complainant subsequently made an application for a review of the independent merits to the Refugee Review Tribunal, a specialist independent review body that provides full and independent reviews of decisions concerning protection visas. On 7 November 2012, the Tribunal affirmed the decision of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection not to grant the complainant a protection visa. The complainant was physically present at the hearing and was able to make oral submissions with the assistance of an interpreter. During the hearing, a member of the Tribunal sought to clarify aspects of the evidence given by the complainant during the protection visa application. The complainant was also invited to respond to the adverse findings made by the decision maker considering the protection visa application (during the hearing or in written submissions). The Tribunal member observed, during the course of the review, a number of very significant inconsistencies and discrepancies in the central components of the applicant’s evidence that significantly detracted from both the plausibility of the applicant’s claims and his overall credibility. 14 The Tribunal member did not find the responses given by the complainant during the hearing — that he was confused and had poor English — to be credible. The complainant was invited to address the matter further in written submissions through his representative, but did not do so. The Tribunal concluded that the complainant’s claims about events that had occurred between March 2009 and May 2010 were not true. The decision maker was of the view that the complainant had manufactured those claims in an attempt to bolster his claims for a protection visa and that he was actually working in Qatar at the time of the alleged events. The complainant also claimed that he was at risk of harm from the authorities and the Karuna group, that he had been forced into hiding and that his father had been tortured by the Karuna group in order to obtain information about the complainant. 4.11 The Refugee Review Tribunal member noted that the Eligibility Guidelines for Assessing the International Protection Needs of Asylum Seekers from Sri Lanka of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) no longer referred to a presumption of eligibility for refugee status for Sri Lankans of Tamil ethnicity and that the complainant had been able to obtain a passport and to travel in and out of Sri Lanka without difficulty. While accepting as plausible the claim that the complainant’s neighbour had been a victim of crime, the Tribunal member did not accept that that indicated that the complainant would also fall victim to crime (in particular, at the hands of criminal gangs) if returned to Eastern Province. Nor did the Tribunal member accept that the complainant’s father had been tortured or that the complainant himself was of interest to the Karuna Group or to the Sri Lankan authorities. Given the concerns about the complainant’s overall credibility, the Tribunal member too rejected the complainant’s claims about his forcible recruitment into LTTE. The member accepted that the complainant may have attended an LTTE-run school and later worked in a hospital, but not that his mother had been abducted and taken hostage. 14 6 For example, the complainant had consistently and on multiple occasions maintained before the State party’s authorities that he had resided in Sri Lanka from March 2009 to May 2010. That claim was contradicted by the fact that the complainant’s Qatari driving licence had been issued in December 2009.