The High Court has refused a Ghanaian woman’s application for judicial review of the Minister’s refusal of subsidiary protection, finding that the decision could rely on information and credibility assessments from her asylum process and that no special circumstances required a further interview.
The case concerned an applicant whose refugee claim had been refused after an oral hearing before the Refugee Appeals Tribunal. She later applied for subsidiary protection. The Minister refused that application in January 2012. She challenged the refusal and a proposed deportation order.
The applicant alleged that, after her father died, her uncle took her to live with a fetish priest against her will. She said the priest raped her and that police declined to help when a complaint was made. These were allegations in her protection claim, not findings made by the High Court.
The judicial review proceeded on limited grounds. The applicant argued that the Minister had relied on adverse credibility findings from the asylum process without separately assessing whether state protection in Ghana would be effective in practice. She also challenged the subsidiary protection procedure on fair hearing grounds. Any challenge to the deportation order depended on success in challenging the subsidiary protection refusal.
The judge considered later Court of Justice of the European Union and Supreme Court decisions on the right to be heard in subsidiary protection cases. The Supreme Court had held that a written process could be sufficient in Ireland’s two stage system if it allowed the applicant to make her case. An interview could still be necessary in exceptional circumstances, including where the authority could not decide the case fully on the available material or where the applicant’s personal circumstances made an interview necessary.
In this case, the court found that the subsidiary protection claim relied on the same core facts and materials as the asylum claim, with some updated country information. The applicant had been interviewed during the asylum process and had made written submissions on subsidiary protection. The judge was not satisfied that the Minister lacked enough information to decide the application or that special or exceptional circumstances requiring another interview had been established.
The court therefore refused relief on the remaining grounds, including the challenge to the subsidiary protection decision. As the deportation challenge depended on that outcome, it did not succeed either. The judgment records that the applicant had made strong use of educational and community opportunities in Ireland, but the court said it was obliged to refuse the application for the reasons given.