The High Court has refused to halt an international protection appeal by a man who says he is Palestinian and from Rafah in Gaza while he separately challenges the first-instance handling of his case.
The applicant, identified as O.A.S.A., says he left Palestine on 1 March 2024, arrived in Ireland the next day and applied for international protection on 4 March.
The International Protection Office interviewed him twice, in March 2024 and July 2025. He supplied a Palestinian Authority birth certificate, but the IPO attached little weight to it because its authenticity could not be verified. The IPO also relied on inconsistencies concerning his journey to Ireland and what happened to his passport, together with the absence of other supporting identity material.
The IPO ultimately found that he had not established Palestinian nationality on the balance of probabilities. Its report stated there was then "no basis to further assess" the protection claim and recommended refusal of refugee and subsidiary protection status. Permission to remain was also refused.
O.A.S.A. brought judicial review proceedings. He argued that rejection of his nationality had improperly stopped the IPO from completing the legal assessment of his claimed fear of persecution or serious harm in Gaza.
He had also lodged an appeal with IPAT. With an oral hearing due on 16 July 2026, he sought a court order pausing that appeal until the judicial review was decided.
Ms Justice Phelan refused the stay. She accepted that concerns could arise about the treatment of the birth certificate, nationality findings and the failure to complete findings on all elements of the protection claim. However, she held that IPAT has a full merits jurisdiction, can hear the applicant orally, receive further or expert evidence and make its own findings on nationality, credibility and protection.
The judge found the alleged defects did not amount to the exceptional kind of fundamental failure that justified interrupting the statutory appeal process. She also held that the balance of justice favoured allowing the appeal to proceed because the applicant remained protected from removal while it was pending.