The High Court dismissed judicial review proceedings brought by two families from Brazil over deportation decisions, and discharged injunctions that had restrained deportation. In one case, the court reviewed a ministerial decision affirming existing deportation orders; in the other, it reviewed a deportation order itself.
In the Ferreira proceedings, the court considered a challenge to the Minister for Justice and Equality’s 4 September 2017 decision under section 3(11) of the Immigration Act 1999 to affirm deportation orders made on 30 September 2016. The family had sought revocation in March 2017. The judge said the applicants had not made protection applications.
The applicants sought to cross-examine a State witness about an alleged scheme connected with the McMahon report on improvements to the protection process. The judge refused the application, finding no sufficiently focused conflict in admissible evidence to justify cross-examination. He also said the applicants were not protection applicants and had produced no evidence that non-protection applicants had benefited from the alleged scheme.
The court held that raising the issue through a later revocation application could not be used to bypass the time limit for challenging the original deportation orders. It also found that the applicants had not made submissions about applying the report when the original section 3 process was under way, and that they could not have qualified under it as non-protection applicants. The judge said he would refuse relief in any event, citing the adult applicants’ unlawful residence and work over twelve years and describing the child applicant’s position as derivative.
The court ordered that the third and fourth named Ferreira applicants be struck out at their request, dismissed the application against the first, second and fifth named applicants, and terminated the injunction.
In the Fernandes proceedings, counsel accepted that the case was essentially governed by the Ferreira submissions. The judge noted that the Fernandes case challenged a deportation order rather than a section 3(11) decision, so that part of the Ferreira reasoning did not apply. Subject to that difference, he applied the same ruling, dismissed the proceedings and discharged the injunction, relying on the other considerations set out in his decision.