The High Court dismissed judicial review proceedings by an anonymised applicant from Guinea who argued that he should be allowed to appeal the refusal of his subsidiary protection application and that a deportation order against him had lost legal effect.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys ruled on 23 March 2018 that the Dublin III Regulation did not apply to the applicant’s case. The take-back request to the United Kingdom had been made before Dublin III took effect on 1 January 2014, so the earlier Dublin II rules continued to govern it. The judge said the applicant therefore had no appeal rights under Dublin III or the Irish 2014 regulations implementing its Dublin system.
The applicant had arrived in Ireland in 2006 and applied for asylum the next day. That application was rejected, and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal affirmed the rejection in 2009. He later applied for subsidiary protection, which the Minister refused in December 2012. A deportation order was issued in January 2013.
After leaving Ireland and applying for asylum in the UK, he was returned to Ireland in March 2014 under the Dublin system. He was refused leave to land and detained for 51 days. The judgment records that he later sought readmission to the protection process, but withdrew that application in 2015 and applied for permission to remain.
The International Protection Appeals Tribunal had told the applicant that it lacked jurisdiction to accept an appeal against the subsidiary protection refusal. His lawyers argued that he was covered by the 2013 subsidiary protection regulations or, alternatively, that he could rely directly on Dublin III. Counsel accepted in court that he was not covered by either the relevant provisions of the 2015 International Protection Act or the 2013 regulations. The judge rejected the Dublin III argument because the take-back request predated the regulation’s applicable date.
The judge also rejected the claim that the deportation order became ineffective when Ireland took the applicant back. He said any challenge on that basis had been brought years outside the applicable time limits. Separately, he said the applicant had delayed proceedings from his return in 2014 until filing in December 2017, and that his intervening application for readmission was inconsistent with his claim that the subsidiary protection process remained open. He said he would refuse relief on discretionary grounds in any event.
The judge refused a proposed amendment to the statement of grounds on the morning of the hearing, citing the delay and disruption it would cause. He dismissed both the motion and the substantive proceedings. After judgment, he refused the applicant’s request to continue an injunction restraining deportation, finding no basis for it and saying the balance of justice weighed against an injunction.