The High Court refused an applicant leave to seek judicial review of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal’s decision to uphold a recommendation that she not be declared a refugee. Mr Justice Hedigan ruled on 29 October 2008 that she had not established substantial grounds for the challenge.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as M. I. A., is a Nigerian national. She said she left her village at 16 after threats linked to a land dispute and later travelled to Ireland. She claimed that a woman identified as J brought her to a shrine in Lagos, forced her to take an oath not to run away, and later threatened her with death and told her she would have to work as a prostitute to repay €60,000.
After a Garda raid on a house in Sligo, the applicant was detained for three days and then placed in HSE care. The judgment also records that CCTV later showed three unidentified Nigerian women looking for her and other girls. At the asylum appeal hearing, the applicant focused on her claimed fear of reprisals from J and the shrine after she broke the oath. She did not rely on her earlier claim about violence in her home village.
The Tribunal rejected her appeal in September 2007, citing credibility concerns and concluding that protection could be available through the International Organisation for Migration in Lagos or through her family if she returned to her village.
The applicant argued that the Tribunal had wrongly attributed evidence about trafficked women returning from Italy to a Garda witness. Justice Hedigan accepted, based on a caseworker’s hearing note and the absence of a respondent affidavit, that the Tribunal had made that attribution error. But he found the underlying information about support for trafficking victims was in a country report before the Tribunal, so the error did not establish grounds to quash the decision.
She also argued that the Tribunal had failed to address conflicting country information fairly. The judge found no significant conflict about whether some protection was available in Nigeria; the reports differed more on its quality and duration. He concluded that the Tribunal could reach its view on the material before it and had regard to natural and constitutional justice.
The State did not object to extending the time for the application, and the court granted that extension. It then refused leave to apply for judicial review. The ruling was at the leave stage; the court did not quash the Tribunal’s decision.