The High Court has quashed the Minister for Justice’s refusal to revoke a deportation order against an anonymised Indian national, sending the matter back for reconsideration.
Mr Justice Ryan ruled that the Minister’s decision of 18 March 2010 was made without a signed statement the applicant gave to Gardaí in November 1999. The statement admitted that he had used the assumed name B. S. in a false asylum application. The judge concluded that having this written evidence could have affected how the Minister assessed the applicant’s character and request to remain.
The case was a judicial review seeking certiorari of the refusal to revoke the deportation order. The court did not itself revoke that order or grant permission to remain. It quashed the refusal and remitted the matter for reconsideration.
The applicant had moved from India to England and then Belfast, where he married an Irish national. After that marriage ended, he moved south and made the asylum application under the assumed name. He stopped using it in 2000, according to the judgment. A deportation order was made in 2002. In 2009, he was granted permission to remain for two years, but in February 2010 fingerprint records connected him to the assumed identity and brought the order to light. He was detained under it.
The Minister refused his request to revoke the order, citing the fraudulent asylum claim, social welfare obtained under the assumed name and criminal convictions. The judgment records that the Minister did not have the 1999 statement when making that decision. The applicant argued that it showed he had admitted the deception and stopped using the assumed name; the Minister argued that the omission was not material and that the applicant’s conduct weighed against relief.
The judge said the humanitarian circumstances made the case finely balanced. They included the applicant’s long-term relationship with an Irish national, their two citizen children, the younger child’s serious medical needs, and the applicant’s relationship with his older son from his former marriage. The couple had bought a home. The judge considered these powerful humanitarian claims weighed against deportation.
Against that background, the signed statement was material because independent written corroboration of the applicant’s account could carry greater weight than his assertion or his solicitor’s. The judge held that its absence affected the assessment in this particular case and quashed the Minister’s decision.