The High Court has refused the Minister for Justice and Equality leave to appeal a ruling that quashed a deportation order made against an anonymised applicant identified as S.G. (Albania).
In a judgment delivered on 14 May 2018, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys considered the Minister’s application to appeal his earlier decision in S.G. (Albania) v Minister for Justice and Equality (No. 1), in which he had granted an order of certiorari concerning the deportation order.
The Minister proposed seven questions for appeal. The judge said six were, in substance, variations on whether he had correctly applied section 26 rather than section 27 of the Interpretation Act 2005. He described another proposed question as a fact-specific complaint about the second ground on which the State had lost in the earlier case, and said it did not concern general or exceptional public importance.
A central difficulty for the Minister, the judge said, was that the State had lost on two grounds in the earlier case. The statutory interpretation point was not decisive because the separate, fact-specific ground also supported the result. In the judge’s view, a point of exceptional public importance should be one on which the decision actually turned: a different answer to it would have to produce a different outcome.
The judge also said he was not satisfied that there was real doubt about the interpretation issue. He considered that the interlocking legal questions supported applying section 26(2)(f), which provides for continuity when legislation refers to repealed Acts. He rejected the Minister’s description of the earlier ruling as striking out part of a statute, saying it was an interpretative exercise directed at references left behind by repealing legislation.
The judgment addressed the Minister’s submission that around 1,000 deportation orders could be affected. The judge said that figure needed to be viewed alongside the limited number of other cases he recalled having been brought on similar grounds: one or possibly two.
The court refused the application for leave to appeal. The order concerned only that application; the judgment records no further order in this proceeding.