The Court held that the Mandarin interpreter at the Tribunal hearing engaged in a defective method of interpretation — interrogating the applicant beyond clarification, altering, omitting, and adding content — such that the translated answers were completely different from the applicant's actual responses. This defective interpretation directly infected the Tribunal's key adverse credibility finding that the applicant had embellished claims about his sister's underworld connections for migration purposes, when the applicant had never made that claim in those terms. Applying BZAID and Perera, the Court found the applicant was effectively prevented from giving evidence on critical matters, constituting a denial of procedural fairness under s 425 of the Migration Act amounting to jurisdictional error.
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