The High Court dismissed a Nigerian woman’s judicial review challenge to a decision affirming a deportation order and discharged an injunction that had restrained her deportation.
In a judgment delivered on 24 November 2017, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys said the challenge concerned the Minister for Justice and Equality’s decision under section 3(11) of the Immigration Act 1999. The applicant sought an order of certiorari to quash that decision.
The judgment records that the applicant entered Ireland on a visitor’s visa in November 2005, remained after it expired, and later applied for asylum and subsidiary protection. Both applications were refused. A deportation order was made on 12 February 2009. The judge said she failed to present to the Garda National Immigration Bureau in March 2009 and was an “evader for almost eight years”.
The applicant later relied on recommendations in the 2015 report of the Working Group on Improvements to the Protection Process, known as the McMahon report. Her solicitors submitted in August 2017 that she had always lived in Ireland with her sister. The judge said that claim could not be reconciled with earlier information submitted on her behalf. The Minister notified her on 9 November 2017 that the deportation order had been affirmed. She was arrested six days later.
The applicant’s case was limited to an alleged ministerial policy on regularising the status of certain undocumented immigrants. The judge said the argument had already been rejected in several High Court decisions. He held that the McMahon report did not create a requirement to publish criteria for deportation decisions, which he described as discretionary, and said the report set out broad criteria in any event.
The judge also found that the applicant did not meet those criteria because she had evaded immigration authorities. He said evidence about her conduct, including the provision of false information, had to be accepted in the absence of cross-examination. Alternatively, he said he would refuse judicial review as a matter of discretion because of her conduct.
The court did not need to decide the question of conditional release. The judge said that, if it had arisen, there were substantial grounds to regard the applicant as a flight risk. The application was dismissed and the injunction restraining deportation discharged.