The High Court has rejected a Georgian woman's challenge to the refusal of international protection despite findings that she had been subjected to violence by her father and feared further serious harm if returned.
In a judgment delivered on 11 March 2026, Mr Justice Cian Ferriter upheld a March 2024 decision of the International Protection Appeals Tribunal concerning N.K., a Georgian national who applied for protection in Ireland in June 2023.
N.K. said her father had been violent towards her after her mother left Georgia for Ireland in 2019. She described a serious assault in March 2023 and said her father threatened to kill her and her mother. The tribunal accepted that her father had been violent to her and that repeated assaults could amount to persecution.
However, it found that her fear was not linked to a Refugee Convention ground. It rejected the proposition that she was persecuted because she was a member of the particular social group of women in Georgia, reasoning that her father had also been violent towards men, including her brother.
The tribunal separately considered subsidiary protection and accepted that N.K. could face serious harm from her father. It nevertheless concluded, after examining country information, that effective State protection against domestic violence was available in Georgia.
In the High Court, N.K. argued that the tribunal had failed to address the death threats specifically and had irrationally rejected her claim to membership of a particular social group.
Mr Justice Ferriter rejected both arguments. He held that the tribunal's analysis of domestic violence was broad enough to encompass threats to kill and potentially fatal violence, and that its country-information assessment included material concerning gender-based killings.
The judge also held that the tribunal was entitled on the evidence to conclude that N.K.'s fear arose from her father's individual violence rather than from her status as a woman. A separate argument that her family constituted a particular social group had not been advanced during the protection process.
The application for judicial review was therefore refused.