The High Court granted an injunction preventing the deportation of an anonymised applicant while the Minister for Justice and Equality determines his application to revoke the deportation order. The court did not decide that the order must be revoked or that deportation would breach refugee or human rights protections.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as A.D.S. (Ghana), had been ordered to leave Ireland by 19 November 2010. He did not leave and applied on 5 August 2011 under section 3(11) of the Immigration Act 1999 to have the order revoked. He relied on information about the treatment of the Fulani in Ghana and raised whether he was entitled to Ghanaian citizenship. His refugee, subsidiary protection and leave-to-remain applications had previously been refused; those decisions were not challenged.
The applicant argued that the Minister had to consider refoulement concerns before carrying out deportation and that his revocation application should automatically suspend the order. The respondents accepted that genuinely new matters indicating a risk of refoulement had to be considered, but argued that the country information repeated matters already assessed and that the citizenship issue could have been raised earlier.
Justice Cross held that alleging refoulement alone does not automatically suspend a valid deportation order. An applicant must show at least that there are matters to be tried. The court also found that the new country information did not establish a changed situation for the Fulani beyond what the Minister had already considered, and it found no evidence from that information of a breach of section 5 of the Refugee Act 1996 or Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The court treated the citizenship concern differently. It said the applicant had maintained that he was born in Ghana, but the asylum process may not have made the meaning of citizenship clear to him, given his illiteracy and the use of an interpreter. The court found no evidence that lack of citizenship by itself would place him in peril. However, it said possible lack of citizenship combined with his circumstances as a Fulani man could raise refoulement concerns.
Whether that evidence requires revocation remains for the Minister to decide. The court found it sufficient to justify an injunction pending the section 3(11) determination. The judgment does not give the injunction’s precise terms. The court did not grant the requested automatic suspension as a general rule, nor did it determine the revocation application.