The High Court refused an application by an anonymised mother and her infant son for an interlocutory injunction to prevent their deportation while their application for leave to pursue judicial review remained unresolved. The court did not determine whether the deportation order was lawful or whether the applicants would ultimately obtain leave to challenge it.
The applicants sought to challenge both the Minister’s refusal of subsidiary protection, dated 7 April 2011, and deportation orders dated 15 July 2011. The Minister had undertaken not to deport them before the initial return date, but declined to extend that undertaking. The injunction application was heard in two parts because different leave thresholds applied to the proposed challenges.
In the first part, delivered on 22 November, Mr Justice Cooke held that the applicants had raised no fair issue showing an entitlement to have the subsidiary protection refusal quashed. He rejected arguments that the decision-maker had to provide a draft determination for comment, finding no specific error that such a process would have corrected. He also found that the determination addressed the mother’s claims and that the other challenges did not identify a stateable flaw capable of supporting certiorari. The court therefore refused an injunction on that basis.
The court later considered whether an injunction was justified on the proposed challenge to the deportation orders. It assumed for that purpose that a fair issue might be shown on at least one ground, but focused on whether deportation before the leave hearing presented a credible risk of irreversible harm.
The mother’s account was that family members had been killed in Nigeria and that a pipeline explosion destroyed her home in Lagos. The court noted that a tribunal had rejected her account as untruthful and found no credible evidence before the court that the applicants faced a real danger of personal harm from the alleged past violence. It also considered reports about conditions for women and single mothers in Nigeria, but found the material too general to establish a distinct or heightened risk to the mother personally.
On 2 December, the court refused the injunction. It stressed that refusing interim relief did not require the Minister to carry out the deportation orders before the judicial review case was heard. It said a later injunction application could be made if circumstances changed and evidence supporting a credible risk became available.