The High Court refused an interlocutory injunction that would have restrained the deportation of an anonymised applicant while he pursued judicial review of the refusal of subsidiary protection and a deportation order.
The application came before the court on 3 October 2011, the first return date of the applicant’s motion for leave to seek judicial review. The Minister had undertaken not to deport him before that date but declined to extend the undertaking. The court heard the injunction application the following morning. It considered only whether the threshold for interim relief was met; the judicial review application itself was not determined in this judgment.
The applicant, a national of Sierra Leone, said he had left that country as a child and lived in Nigeria with his family. He claimed that after discovering guns near his apartment in Nigeria and reporting them, he was pursued and shot at, sustaining a flesh wound. He said he fled Nigeria in 2006 and arrived in Ireland that September. His refugee claim had received a negative recommendation, upheld on appeal by the Refugee Appeals Tribunal.
The Minister refused his subsidiary protection application on 25 February 2011 and made a deportation order on 2 March 2011. The applicant argued that the regulations governing subsidiary protection failed to implement European Union requirements for cooperation in assessing applications and an effective appeal remedy. He also argued that the absence of an appeal breached the principle of equivalence with the asylum process.
The court rejected those arguments for the purpose of the injunction application. It held that the European procedures directive did not require an appeal in Ireland’s separate subsidiary protection process, and that the domestic asylum appeal procedure was not a suitable comparator for the equivalence argument. The judgment also explained that ordinary fair procedures may require an applicant to have an opportunity to respond if a decision relies on material new information, but the applicant had identified no particular finding that consultation could have changed.
The court further found no stateable challenge to the deportation order. The applicant’s account concerned events in Nigeria, while the order was assessed on the basis of possible return to Sierra Leone; the court said no case had been made explaining why return to Sierra Leone would make the order unlawful. It concluded that the test for an interlocutory injunction had not been met and refused the application. The court did not, by that ruling, decide the underlying judicial review challenge.