The High Court has rejected a Nigerian applicant’s challenge to the refusal of subsidiary protection, and refused her request to add a new ground more than three months after the decision she sought to challenge.
In a judgment delivered on 20 April 2012, Mr Justice Kevin Cross dismissed the grounds for which leave to seek judicial review had been granted. Those grounds argued that Ireland’s rules failed to implement an EU protection directive properly, that the Minister had not cooperated with the applicant in assessing her claim, and that judicial review did not provide an effective remedy.
The judgment records that the applicant said she feared being forced to marry a 65-year-old Muslim man in Nigeria. She said she was Christian, had married a Christian man after the threatened marriage, and feared for her life after the older man learned of that marriage. These were her claims, not findings made in this judicial review.
The court said earlier High Court decisions had rejected the arguments about cooperation and the availability of an effective remedy. It also distinguished a Supreme Court case concerning local authority possession proceedings, concluding that the features of that statutory process did not apply to subsidiary protection decisions, which could be reviewed by the High Court.
The applicant then sought to amend her grounds to argue that the decision maker had wrongly treated serious harm as harm that could only be inflicted by an “actor of serious harm”. The court considered whether there was good and sufficient reason to extend time and examined the proposed argument on its merits. It refused the amendment, noting the delay and that no past serious harm had been suffered, although threats were alleged. The judge said that even if the new ground had been raised in time, it would not have succeeded on these facts.
The judgment therefore refused certiorari, the order sought to quash the subsidiary protection refusal. It did not determine a deportation decision: the court recorded that none had been made and that consideration of deportation had been halted pending the proceedings.