The High Court refused a mother’s application for leave to seek judicial review of deportation orders made against her and her three Nigerian-born children, finding no substantial grounds for the proposed challenges. Mr Justice Michael Peart delivered the judgment on 27 July 2007.
The applicants sought to challenge orders signed by the Minister for Justice on 4 October 2005. They argued, among other things, that deporting the mother’s husband and the children’s father before the end of a 14-day period for seeking judicial review, and while a separate application for the family’s Ireland-born child remained unresolved, breached their family rights.
The judge said there was no requirement to wait until the 14-day period expired before deportation. The orders for the husband and the other applicants had been made on the same day, and officials intended to deport the family together. The mother and children were not found at their address when officers attended on 19 October 2005; the husband was deported. The judge concluded that the applicants had not shown substantial grounds for claiming that his deportation breached their rights.
The second challenge was that the Minister should not have made the orders against the mother and her Nigerian-born children without first resolving the position of the Ireland-born child, who was born after 1 January 2005 and was not an Irish citizen. The judge said the child’s circumstances had been considered in the department’s examination of the family’s representations. At that point, no refugee-status application had been lodged for him. A separate application was lodged on 13 October 2005 and later refused; a judicial-review leave application concerning that refusal was not before this court.
The judgment also addressed a claim, raised in the mother’s affidavit, that her daughter faced a risk of female genital mutilation in Nigeria. The judge said that issue had not been raised during the refugee application, despite the mother being told she could raise separate matters concerning the children. He questioned the claim’s credibility but said it had not affected his assessment of whether the threshold for leave was met.
The court refused leave. It did not decide the request for an extension of time, saying it was unnecessary to do so; the judge remarked that the evidence did not explain or excuse the delay.