Barrister using AI citied cases that were 'entirely fictitious' in asylum appeal
Judge rules immigration barrister used AI tools such as ChatGPT to prepare his legal research and wasted court time with ‘wholly irrelevant’ submissions.
An immigration barrister is facing disciplinary action after a judge ruled he used AI to prepare legal research which contained "entirely fictitious" cases.
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A tribunal heard that a judge was left stunned when Chowdhury Rahman submitted the "wholly irrelevant" cases.
Mr Rahman was representing two Honduran sisters claiming asylum in the UK when he made the submissions.
The sisters were attempting to prove that they were being targeted by brutal gang MS-13.
During an Upper Tier Tribunal for their case, Judge Mark Blundell ruled that “nothing said by Mr Rahman orally or in writing establishes an error of law on the part of the judge”.
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In a postscript of the judgement, Judge Blundell referred to “significant problems” on Mr Rahman's legal research.
The judge said that of 12 authorities cited in the appeal, some did not even exist and others “did not support the propositions of law for which they were cited in the grounds”.
Judge Blundell also found that Mr Rahman was “unfamiliar” with legal search engines and “consistently unable to grasp” how to direct him to cases cited.
Upon further examination, Mr Rahman was found to be using a case which had recently been wrongly deployed in another legal case.
“It is overwhelmingly likely, in my judgment, that Mr Rahman used generative Artificial Intelligence to formulate the grounds of appeal in this case, and that he attempted to hide that fact from me during the hearing,” Judge Blundell said.
“He has been called to the Bar of England and Wales, and it is simply not possible that he misunderstood all of the authorities cited in the grounds of appeal to the extent that I have set out above.”
He concluded that he was now considering reporting Mr Rahman to the Bar Standards Board.