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An immigration barrister could face a disciplinary investigation after a judge’s ruling AI tools like ChatGPT To prepare your legal research.
A tribunal heard that a judge They were astonished when Chaudhry Rehman presented his arguments, which cited cases that “completely imaginary” or “completely irrelevant”.
A judge found that when Mr Rahman was questioned he also tried to “conceal” it and “waste” the tribunal’s time.
The incident occurred when Mr Rahman was representing two Honduran sisters who were claiming asylum in the UK on the grounds that they were being targeted by a violent criminal gang called Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13).
After arriving at Heathrow Airport in June 2022, they claimed asylum and said during a screening interview that the gang wanted to make them “their women”.
He also claimed that gang members had threatened to kill his families and were searching for him ever since he left the country.
In November 2023, the Home Office rejected his asylum claim, saying that his accounts were “inconsistent and not supported by documentary evidence”.
He appealed the case to the First-tier Tribunal, but the application was rejected by a judge who “did not accept that the appellants were the target of adverse attention” from MS-13.
This was followed by an appeal in the Upper Tribunal, where Mr Rahman was acting as his barrister. During the hearing, he argued that the judge failed to adequately assess credibility, made an error of law in assessing documentary evidence, and failed to consider the impact of internal transfers.
However, these claims were similarly rejected by Judge Mark Blundell, who dismissed the appeal and ruled that “nothing said orally or in writing by Mr Rahman establishes an error of law on the part of the judge”.
However, in a postscript to the judgment, Judge Blundell referred to “significant problems” arising from the appeal in relation to Mr Rahman’s legal research.
Of the 12 authorities cited in the appeal, the judge found on reading that some did not exist, and others “did not support the propositions of law for which they were cited in the grounds”.
Upon investigating this, he found that Mr Rahman appeared to be “unfamiliar” with legal search engines and was “consistently unable to understand” where to direct the judge in the cases he cited.
Mr Rahman said he had used “various websites” to conduct his research, with the judge saying that one of the cases cited had recently been misappropriated by ChatGPIT in another legal case.
Judge Blundell said that Mr Rahman appeared to know “nothing” about any of the authorities he cited, some of which did not exist, so all his submissions were “misleading”.
Judge Blundell said, “In my judgment, it is highly likely that Mr Rahman used generative artificial intelligence to prepare the grounds for appeal in this case and that he attempted to conceal this fact from me during the hearing.”
“He has been called to the Bar of England and Wales, and it is simply not possible that he would have misjudged all the authorities cited in the grounds of appeal to the extent that I have stated above.”
He concluded that he was now considering reporting Mr Rahman to the Bar Standards Board.