The Supreme Court has dismissed appeals by two families challenging deportation orders, upholding the High Court’s decision that the orders could stand despite each family having a child born in Ireland who was an Irish citizen.
In a judgment delivered on 23 January 2003, Chief Justice Keane said the children’s citizenship gave them constitutional and legal rights, including a general right not to be expelled from Ireland and a right to the care and company of their families. But the court rejected the argument that those rights automatically entitled their non-Irish parents and siblings to remain in the State until the children reached adulthood.
The first appeal concerned David Lobe, Jana Loveova and their children, Czech nationals who arrived in Ireland on 31 March 2001. Their asylum applications were to be transferred to the United Kingdom under the Dublin Convention. A child was born in Galway in November 2001. The second appeal concerned Nigerian nationals Anderw Osayande and Flora Osayande and their children. The United Kingdom had refused Osayande’s earlier asylum claim and agreed to receive the family under the convention; a child was born in Castlebar in October 2001.
The families challenged the deportation decisions through judicial review proceedings. The High Court rejected their claims in April 2002, and they appealed. The Supreme Court said the parents’ presence in Ireland could lawfully be ended, and that the practical consequence might be that the Irish-citizen children left with their families or were separated from them.
The court distinguished the earlier case of Fajujonu, which required the Minister to consider the family’s constitutional rights in its particular circumstances. There, the family had lived in Ireland for about eight years, made it their home, and the father had been offered employment. The Supreme Court found those circumstances absent in the two appeals before it.
Keane said the Minister could consider the orderly administration of asylum and immigration procedures and Ireland’s obligations under the Dublin Convention. The court’s role was limited to judicial review; it did not sit as an appeal body on the Minister’s decisions. Applying the test of whether the decisions were so contrary to reason and common sense that they had to be set aside, the court found they were not.
The Supreme Court dismissed both appeals and affirmed the High Court order. It did not itself make new deportation orders; it upheld the challenged decisions against the legal grounds advanced in these proceedings.