The High Court has allowed a woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo to seek judicial review of decisions refusing to readmit her to the asylum process and revoke her deportation order. The court did not quash either decision or determine the underlying claims; it ruled that specified grounds could proceed to a substantive hearing.
Mr Justice Barr delivered the judgment on 25 February 2015. The applicant, identified in the judgment by initials, had been refused refugee status in 2009 after negative credibility findings by the Refugee Applications Commissioner and Refugee Appeals Tribunal. She did not challenge that decision. She was later refused subsidiary protection and leave to remain, and a deportation order was made in September 2011.
In July 2012, she applied for consent to make a further asylum application under section 17(7) of the Refugee Act 1996 and separately asked the Minister to revoke the deportation order under section 3(11) of the Immigration Act 1999. Her submissions included a 2011 report, “Unsafe Return”, about the treatment of Congolese asylum seekers returned from the UK, along with other country information. The Minister refused readmission in November 2012. In February 2013, an official recommended affirming the deportation order after considering the submitted material and a UK Border Agency fact-finding report about returns to Kinshasa.
For the readmission challenge, the judge found substantial grounds to argue that “Unsafe Return” was significant new evidence that should have been considered under the statutory test. He also allowed challenges concerning whether Irish return arrangements could identify the applicant as a failed asylum seeker; the treatment of evidence about risk and the assessment of whether the new material met the statutory threshold; whether the decision-maker was required to make further inquiries; and whether the readmission application was assessed separately from the revocation application. Other grounds, including challenges to the use of earlier credibility findings and to the balancing of country information, were not allowed to proceed.
For the challenge to the refusal to revoke the deportation order, the judge allowed five grounds to proceed: that the risk assessment was irrational; that the decision-maker should have examined information about prison conditions; that the weight given to the UK report was irrational; that the legal standard for assessing risk was incorrect; and that the Minister could be perceived as biased because of her earlier role in the applicant’s immigration proceedings. Other grounds, including the claim that the applicant should have been given a chance to comment on later country information, were rejected at this stage.
The ruling grants permission to seek certiorari on the specified grounds in each set of proceedings. It is a decision on whether the challenges may go forward, not a final ruling on their merits or on the lawfulness of the deportation order.