The High Court held that a woman from Mauritius was a “settled migrant” in Ireland while she held student permission from December 2007 to September 2012. The court limited its judgment to that status question and did not decide whether the deportation order against her should be quashed.
The woman, identified in the judgment only as S.O., sought judicial review of a deportation order made on 27 May 2016. She had been granted leave to bring the case in July 2016. Her grounds included claims that the Minister had wrongly assessed the effect of deportation on her private life and had failed to account for her time in Ireland, integration and other information.
The Minister opposed the challenge, arguing that the woman’s residence was precarious and that the decision gave adequate reasons. At the hearing, however, both sides confined their submissions to whether her student permission made her a settled migrant for the period it was valid. The Minister had withdrawn an argument that the deportation decision should stand even if she was found to be a settled migrant for some period.
The judgment records that S.O. arrived in Ireland in October 2007 and obtained student permission, renewed annually, from 10 December that year until 30 September 2012. She later applied for a change to stamp 4 permission and for temporary permission to work while that application was considered. Both applications were refused in September 2013. The court also noted that she continued working after her student permission expired and that her residence from then was without permission.
In reaching its conclusion, Ms Justice O’Regan considered earlier High Court and Court of Appeal decisions, including the competing approaches in W.S. and Rughoonauth. She accepted that W.S. contained an error, but said it was the omission of the word “implicit” when describing the Court of Appeal’s recognition that student permission could be considered within the settled-migrant concept. She retained the view in W.S., subject to that clarification.
The court concluded that S.O.’s student permission gave rise to settled-migrant status for the period from 10 December 2007 to 30 September 2012. It expressly said the judgment was limited because the parties had limited their arguments to that question. The source does not record a final ruling on the application to quash the deportation order.