The High Court has refused an anonymised woman’s application to halt her deportation while she challenges a decision refusing extra time to lodge an international protection appeal.
P.C.D. applied for protection after arriving in Ireland in June 2024. Her claim concerned an abusive former marriage in South Africa and alleged subsequent threats from her ex-husband and pressure from family members in Eswatini to remarry him.
An International Protection Officer accepted that she had been in an abusive marriage which ended in divorce in 2008, but rejected later parts of her account after identifying inconsistencies. Her protection application and request for permission to remain were refused.
The judgment records that P.C.D. attended her solicitor’s office in August 2025 and signed an appeal. However, because of an internal administrative error, the document was filed away instead of being sent to the International Protection Appeals Tribunal. Her later emails questioning correspondence saying no appeal had been made were also overlooked.
By the time the error was identified, a deportation order had been signed. IPAT subsequently refused to extend the appeal deadline, finding that the solicitor’s office error did not amount to special circumstances.
P.C.D. is challenging that refusal by judicial review. Her case is among more than 50 similar challenges being held pending Court of Appeal judgments in test cases. Leave to bring her judicial review has not yet been granted.
Ms Justice Siobhán Phelan accepted that the absence of an IPAT appeal distinguished P.C.D.’s circumstances from many deportation cases. However, an injunction required the court to consider where the greater risk of injustice lay while the case remained unresolved.
The judge held that the existing deportation order remained valid and had not itself been challenged. She found insufficient evidence that P.C.D. faced a real risk from her former husband or family, particularly given the adverse credibility findings and the unchallenged decision that returning her would not breach the prohibition on refoulement, meaning return to a place where she faces prohibited serious harm.
The court also found no evidence that removal would prevent P.C.D. continuing the judicial review from abroad. The application to restrain deportation was therefore refused.