The High Court has refused a judicial review application seeking to quash the refusal of a join parent visa for a Nigerian applicant. The court held that the refusal would stand because adequate parental consent for the applicant’s travel had not been demonstrated, even if the other grounds of challenge succeeded.
The case concerned a decision made on appeal on 23 September 2015. The first applicant, identified in the judgment as A, was born apparently in 1998 and was a Nigerian national. The second applicant, V.T.A., was an Irish national who said she was A’s mother. A minor sued through his mother and next friend, V.T.A.
The visa application had been refused after the appeals officer cited concerns about documents, inconsistencies in information, a lack of evidence of an ongoing parental relationship and uncertainty about the identity of A’s father. The officer also said the material did not establish a family link to V.A. and that the parental travel consent provided was insufficient to satisfy the officer.
The applicants argued that the decision failed to address constitutional and European Convention on Human Rights claims. They also said it did not engage with V.T.A.’s offer to undergo DNA testing through the respondent’s procedures. The judgment records that DNA evidence had been submitted with the application, but the respondent did not accept it because it had not taken part in securing the test. The policy cited in the judgment allowed DNA testing to be proposed by either party, required advance approval by the immigration service, and said other evidence should be considered if DNA evidence was unavailable.
The court did not decide the applicants’ challenges to the DNA reasoning or the treatment of constitutional and Article 8 rights. It found that even success on those grounds would not justify quashing the decision, because the separate finding on parental travel consent remained a sufficient basis for refusal. The court also declined to grant declaratory relief on issues it said had not been fully argued. The application for certiorari was refused.