The High Court has refused an applicant’s request for a certificate allowing an appeal to the Supreme Court over a limited costs order in a deportation case.
Mr Justice Hogan ruled that the statutory requirements for a certificate were not met. He said it was unclear whether the case raised a real point of law and that its particular facts did not make it a matter of exceptional public importance.
The underlying judicial review challenged a deportation order made against K. I., a Nigerian asylum seeker who arrived in Ireland in December 2008. His asylum application was refused, as was a later application for subsidiary protection. In a 2011 judgment, the High Court refused him leave to seek judicial review, while noting that the case raised concerns about how earlier Supreme Court authority applied where the rest of the family was lawfully established in Ireland.
After the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its judgment in *Ruiz-Zambrano* in March 2011, the Minister asked the High Court to defer its decision on an appeal certificate while the department reviewed cases involving deportation of parents of Irish citizen children. The proceedings were adjourned as the Minister considered the applicant’s case. The Minister later granted him permission to remain for an extended but defined period, without specifying the reason.
The applicant’s solicitors accepted that the substantive proceedings had become moot, leaving costs in dispute. At a March 2012 ruling, the High Court ordered the applicant to pay 25% of the respondents’ costs. The court considered that the Minister had prevailed and would ordinarily be presumptively entitled to the full costs, but that a full award would be unfair in the circumstances.
The applicant argued at the costs hearing that the Minister’s decision showed he would have succeeded under *Ruiz-Zambrano*. The Minister disputed that interpretation. Mr Justice Hogan said there was no evidence that permission had been granted because of that judgment, and the court had not determined that the applicant was entitled to remain on that basis.
The certificate application concerned the costs ruling, not a fresh determination of the deportation challenge. The judge refused the applicant’s request, finding the statutory criteria unsatisfied. Because he refused that request, the Minister’s proposed request for a certificate to cross-appeal the costs order did not arise.