The High Court refused to extend the time for a Cameroonian applicant to seek judicial review of the refusal of subsidiary protection and a deportation order. Mr Justice McDermott concluded that the challenge did not establish substantial grounds for review. He said execution of the deportation order was a matter for the Minister.
The applicant sought to quash the refusal of subsidiary protection and the deportation order. He argued that the decision maker had unlawfully failed to assess the risk he faced in Cameroon, his country of nationality, and had wrongly assumed he could live in Nigeria or Mali. He also said there had been no proper assessment of whether he could assert citizenship in either country.
The judgment recounts the applicant’s claims that he had fled persecution in Cameroon, obtained refugee status in Nigeria and Mali, and later faced threats in Mali because of his human rights work. Earlier Irish refugee decisions had rejected his claim of likely persecution in Mali; those decisions were not challenged in these proceedings. In evidence before the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, he acknowledged that he had not encountered difficulties while living in Mali.
The court noted that the subsidiary protection decision treated him as stateless, with Mali as his former country of habitual residence, and focused on his claimed risk in Mali and Nigeria. The decision recorded that he had refugee status in Mali and Nigeria and accepted that he feared harm in Cameroon, but did not examine that Cameroon risk further. The court held that this approach was consistent with the basis on which he had made his applications and the evidence then before the decision maker. It said the later claim that he no longer had a right to reside in Mali or Nigeria had not been presented to the decision maker and was unsupported by an affidavit of laws.
The judge added that even if the decision maker should have assessed risk in Cameroon, that risk had been accepted and there was no intention to return the applicant there. The court was not satisfied that further consideration would have advanced the subsidiary protection claim. It also declined to consider the later material as a basis to quash either decision.
The proceedings were issued 14 days after notification of the decision, beyond the statutory period discussed in the judgment. The court declined to extend time because it was not satisfied that substantial grounds existed for judicial review. The challenge to the deportation order therefore failed; the court did not quash it or decide to execute it.