The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by two anonymised asylum applicants against decisions that the United Kingdom was responsible for examining their applications under the Dublin III Regulation. The court upheld the High Court’s refusal to quash the decisions of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, which had affirmed the transfers.
The applicants, identified in the judgment as BS and RS, said they were Albanian nationals who had previously lived in Kosova. They arrived in Ireland on 12 December 2014 and applied for asylum two days later. The judgment says they gave an untruthful account of their arrival. UK authorities later told Ireland that fingerprints supplied by the Irish authorities matched records for two people with matching dates of birth but different names. Those records showed valid UK multi-visit visas, issued in Warsaw, covering the period when the applicants applied for asylum.
The applicants argued that Ireland’s request for information from the UK did not comply with Article 34 of the Regulation because it did not state its grounds or the evidence supporting it. They said the information obtained could not lawfully support the transfer decisions. The Court of Appeal held that Article 34 governs information-sharing between states and does not give applicants an individual right to challenge defects in the request form. It also found that, in this case, the form and accompanying information made the request’s purpose sufficiently clear to the UK authorities.
The court rejected the data-protection arguments as well. It said the fingerprints had been lawfully taken under Irish law and sent to establish which state was responsible for the asylum applications. The UK had reported a match with its records; it had not sent the applicants’ fingerprints to Ireland.
The applicants also challenged the timing of the UK take-charge requests. The requests were made on 16 March 2015, the final day of the three-month limit, after a delay of about a month from receipt of the UK information. The Court of Appeal did not decide whether an applicant can, in principle, challenge a transfer because a request was not made “as quickly as possible”. It assumed that such a challenge might be available, but held that these applicants could not succeed on the facts: the requests were within the express deadline, the UK accepted responsibility, and the applicants’ false account had made the information request necessary.
The court therefore dismissed the appeal. It did not decide the separate ground concerning the High Court’s discretionary reasons for refusing relief. An injunction preventing transfer remained in place pending final determination of the proceedings; the judgment does not state a further order lifting it.