The High Court has dismissed a Georgian woman’s request to prevent her deportation while the Minister for Justice considered her residency application and a request to revoke a deportation order.
In a judgment delivered on 31 July 2018, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys said the applicant had not established an entitlement to a substantive injunction. The proceedings were dismissed. The judgment did not decide the pending applications to the Minister or determine their merits.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as N.M. (Georgia), arrived in Ireland in August 2005. Her asylum application was refused and an appeal was dismissed. A subsidiary protection application was also refused. Earlier judicial review proceedings led to the quashing of a subsidiary protection refusal in 2012, but a later refusal was upheld in proceedings dismissed in February 2018. Other proceedings concerning a decision under the Immigration Act 1999 and a deportation order were struck out by consent.
A deportation order was made on 10 April 2015. The applicant later sought permission to work in Ireland, which was rejected on 28 February 2018, and applied for residency relying on the McMahon report. The Minister refused to give an undertaking that she would not be deported while that application was pending. On 9 July 2018, the Minister said the applicant’s residency correspondence would be treated as an application to revoke the deportation order under section 3(11) of the 1999 Act.
The court noted that no decision had yet been made on the residency application, making the case precautionary. It also held that the request was for a substantive injunction, so the applicant had to show an entitlement to the order, rather than rely only on the balance of convenience.
Justice Humphreys said the McMahon report did not confer rights on applicants in this situation and that the applicant had not established an entitlement based on it. He also said time spent in Ireland because of litigation did not create an equity in her favour when seeking an injunction. The court left assessment of the section 3(11) application to the Minister.