The High Court has restrained the deportation of an anonymised applicant until his subsidiary protection application is lawfully determined, in an interlocutory order made on 16 March 2017.
The judicial review arose after the applicant, identified as M.A., sought an injunction preventing his deportation. His solicitor’s letter of 5 March 2017 applied for subsidiary protection. The applicant said he arrived in Ireland in 2014 and feared returning to Pakistan because his former girlfriend’s family blamed him for her suicide, had threatened his family and had made death threats against him. He also claimed police had named him in a newspaper as wanted for causing her suicide. These were claims set out in the application, not findings by the court.
The Minister did not dispute the form of the application. The dispute was whether it could be treated as valid without the applicant first giving a compelling explanation for delay. The Minister relied on a letter from the International Protection Office dated 13 March 2017, which said the application was out of time. The judgment records that the applicant had been refused refugee status in 2015; it also refers to notification of that refusal by registered letter dated 30 June 2015.
The applicant relied on the Court of Justice of the European Union’s ruling in Danqua and a subsequent Court of Appeal decision. Those decisions held that the 15-working-day deadline for applying for subsidiary protection breached the EU principle of effectiveness. Justice O’Regan concluded that the deadline had been suspended for all such applications. In the absence of a replacement time limit, she said, the court could not identify when delay began or require the applicant to establish good grounds for it.
The judge therefore found that the Minister could not suspend recognition of the application until the applicant provided compelling reasons for delay. She granted an interlocutory injunction restraining deportation until the 5 March 2017 application was lawfully determined, referring to the applicant’s entitlement to remain in the State pending determination of a valid application under section 16(1) of the International Protection Act 2015.
The order addressed interim protection pending that determination. The judgment does not decide the merits of the subsidiary protection application.