The High Court has referred three questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in a group of judicial review cases challenging the rejection of international protection applications as inadmissible.
The cases concern three anonymised applicants, identified as M.S. and M.W., both from Afghanistan, and G.S., a Georgian national. Each had previously received subsidiary protection in Italy. The International Protection Office (IPO) treated their later Irish applications as inadmissible, and the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) upheld those decisions.
The applicants sought judicial review of the tribunal decisions. G.S. also sought a declaration that section 21(2)(a) of the International Protection Act 2015 was contrary to EU law and invalid. The High Court judgment does not decide whether the tribunal decisions should be quashed or whether the legislation is valid.
The legal issue arose from the interaction between an EU asylum procedures directive and the Dublin system. Ireland and the UK were described in the judgment as bound by the Dublin III regulation but not by the recast procedures directive. The court considered whether the original directive allowed a state in that position to reject an application where another member state had already granted subsidiary protection.
The court referred three questions to the CJEU. They ask which state is meant by “the Member State concerned” in parts of the directive; whether a further protection application after subsidiary protection elsewhere can amount to an abuse of rights; and whether the directive prevents a state in Ireland’s position from making such applications inadmissible.
Justice Richard Humphreys gave his proposed interpretations of those questions in the judgment, including that a repeat application could amount to an abuse of rights. Those views are not the CJEU’s answers. The High Court’s order was to refer the questions under Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The judgment records no final outcome of the judicial review claims.