A Supreme Court judge has concluded that errors in the Minister for Justice’s assessment of an Albanian man’s private life did not require the relevant decisions to be quashed, and would dismiss his appeal. The judgment was delivered by Mr Justice Gerard Hogan on 24 November 2022.
The appellant arrived in Ireland in September 2016, aged 16 and unaccompanied. His applications for asylum and international protection were refused. The Minister then refused him leave to remain on 4 December 2019 and made a deportation order on 17 February 2020. The appeal concerned those decisions.
Justice Hogan said the appellant, as a non-national, could rely on constitutional privacy and associational rights, including rights associated with Article 40.3 and Article 40.6.1.iii of the Constitution. He also agreed that the Minister was wrong to conclude that the effect of deportation did not reach the level of seriousness needed to engage the right to private life under Article 8(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights.
However, Justice Hogan considered that the Minister had, in substance, carried out the required proportionality assessment. He said the appellant’s friendships and social activities would be affected by his removal, but found nothing exceptional or remarkable about the ties described in his case that would outweigh the State’s interest in controlling immigration and maintaining the integrity of the asylum system. On that basis, he considered the decision justifiable under Article 8(2) and not unreasonable or disproportionate in the relevant legal sense.
The judgment also addressed the broader legal test. Justice Hogan rejected an approach that would require an unsettled migrant to show exceptional circumstances before Article 8(1) private-life rights could be engaged. He said those rights would generally be engaged by a proposed deportation, while the outcome of the separate proportionality assessment would depend on the circumstances.
The procedural outcome must be read in light of the judgment’s authorship. Justice Hogan said he disagreed with Justice MacMenamin on whether the Minister’s decision should be quashed, and concluded that the appeal should be dismissed. He also cautioned that other cases involving similar legal errors could have different outcomes where a claimant’s private-life ties were more deeply embedded. The source text does not state the Court’s formal order or the majority’s full reasoning.