The Court held that an applicant alleging fraudulent or unauthorised withdrawal of a Tribunal review application bears the burden of proving the fraud or want of authority to the standard in s 140 of the Evidence Act 1995, and bare assertions without corroborating evidence are insufficient. The Tribunal was under no duty to independently verify the authenticity of a withdrawal request where nothing on its face or in the surrounding circumstances alerted it to irregularity, and acceptance of the withdrawal in those circumstances was not legally unreasonable. Once a withdrawal is accepted, the Tribunal is functus officio and has no power to reinstate the review application, and s 430(2A) of the Migration Act prohibits variation or revocation of the written decision absent an obvious jurisdictional error of the kind recognised in Bhardwaj.
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