The Supreme Court has set aside a High Court order requiring the State to meet reasonable costs for four deported applicants to return to Ireland and allowing them to re-enter while pursuing challenges to their deportation orders.
In a judgment delivered on 2 March 2006, Mr Justice Geoghegan said the Commissioner of An Garda Síochána and the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform were entitled to have that part of the High Court order overturned. The appeal concerned an order made by Mr Justice Peart in October 2004 after the applicants had been deported.
The four cases involved Bosun Adebayo, Peter Chinedu Igwe, siblings Folashade Jacob, Oyeshola Jacob and Ronke Jacob, and Jide Johnson Ondukan. The applicants had obtained court orders on the night of 6 April 2004, including conditional habeas corpus orders and interim injunctions. The High Court found that the orders were not received by the relevant authorities until after the deportation flight had left, and that there had been no deliberate disobedience. The Supreme Court agreed and said there was no contempt of court on the facts found by the trial judge.
By the time the authorities had notice of the orders, the applicants had landed in Lagos and were no longer detained. The Supreme Court agreed that the habeas corpus proceedings had become moot and that the Irish courts could not determine the lawfulness of detention once the applicants were outside the jurisdiction and no longer under the control of people subject to the High Court’s authority.
The court held that the High Court could not order the State to fund the applicants’ return or permit re-entry in either the contempt or habeas corpus proceedings. It said a remedy of that kind might be considered in the judicial review proceedings challenging the deportation orders, but that would be for the judge hearing those cases to decide. Such relief would be drastic and should be granted sparingly.
The judgment also set out Geoghegan J’s view on the timing of deportation while judicial review is pursued. He said, tentatively, that a person could not be deported during the statutory 14-day period for applying for leave to seek judicial review. If an application was filed within that period, he said deportation could not proceed until the court decided the leave application, and any later stay would depend on the court’s order. Where an application required an extension of time, he said deportation could proceed unless an interim injunction had been obtained.
The Supreme Court refused a separate motion seeking to delay hearing the appeals and dismissed the applicants’ cross-appeals. It allowed the Commissioner’s and Minister’s appeals and set aside the return and re-entry order. The judicial review challenges themselves remained to be heard.