The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by a Nigerian mother and her son against the refusal to revoke their deportation order. It also found no basis to stop the order being implemented while the appeal was pending. The judgment was delivered by Mr Justice Charleton on 16 July 2015.
The applicants are identified in the judgment by assumed names, Prudence and Simon. Simon was born in Ireland in 2006. His mother arrived in 2006 while heavily pregnant. The judgment records that she claimed to have left Nigeria fearing persecution; the Court said it saw no basis on which the applicants could be considered refugees.
Their application for refugee status was refused in 2007. They did not appeal to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, and later withdrew a judicial review challenge. They did not apply for subsidiary protection or leave to remain after receiving a letter setting out their options. The Minister made a deportation order in May 2012.
In September 2012, their solicitors asked the Minister to revoke the order under section 3(11) of the Immigration Act 1999. The Minister refused in February 2013. The applicants sought judicial review, but the High Court rejected their challenge in March 2014. They appealed that decision to the Supreme Court and sought an injunction against deportation while the appeal was heard.
The Supreme Court found no legal flaw in the Minister’s consideration of the material. It accepted the High Court’s conclusion that the Minister had used relevant, more recent country information and was not required to disclose publicly available material before deciding the revocation request. The Court said a section 3(11) application must put forward new or additional material; repeating previously rejected claims was not enough. It also rejected the argument that the absence of guidelines for cases involving children invalidated the decision.
On family and private life, the Court noted that Simon had started school in Ireland, while his mother’s husband and both applicants’ wider family were in Nigeria. It concluded that the Minister had considered their circumstances and that the children’s social and educational ties did not amount to exceptional circumstances requiring permission to remain. The Court said humanitarian considerations could still be weighed by the Minister in exercising discretion, but held that the Minister was legally entitled to affirm the order.
The deportation order itself had not been challenged in the High Court and remained valid. The Supreme Court said no new facts or country information cast doubt on it, and dismissed the injunction application as well as the substantive appeal. It ordered the applicants’ solicitors to pay the Minister’s costs of written submissions responding to an EU-law reference request that the applicants had raised and later withdrawn.