The High Court has refused two joined appeals against the Minister for Justice and Equality’s decisions to revoke the appellants’ refugee status, concluding that they had not shown grounds for the court to interfere.
The appeals concerned two people identified in the judgment as S.A.S. and A.A.S. They said they were Somali cousins who had arrived in Ireland as unaccompanied minors in 2005 and had been granted refugee status after the Refugee Appeals Tribunal overturned earlier negative recommendations.
The revocation process began after a fingerprint check linked the appellants to UK visa applications made in 2005 using Tanzanian passports. The Minister proposed revoking their status in January 2012, saying the information indicated they were Tanzanian nationals and had given false or misleading information about their nationality. The appellants disputed that conclusion and said they had travelled on fraudulently obtained documents arranged through an agent. They also relied on Somali birth certificates and evidence of their Bajuni language and community ties.
The appellants challenged the evidence and the fairness of the process, including the redaction of material disclosed to them. They argued that the Minister had to establish that their asylum applications would have been decided differently if the visa information had been known. The Minister’s position was that nationality, residence and travel history were central to the asylum claims, and that the burden was on the appellants to show the revocation decisions were wrong.
Justice Stewart held that the burden of proof rested on the appellants. The court’s task was to decide whether the asylum applications would have been determined differently had the information then available to the Minister been before the Tribunal member—not to decide afresh whether the appellants qualified as refugees.
The judge noted that the appellants accepted in affidavits that they had travelled using Tanzanian passports and visas, while saying the documents were fraudulent. The court also considered their failure to disclose those documents during the asylum process, their accounts of their involvement with UK visa authorities, and their later production of Somali birth certificates despite having previously said they had no identity documents.
The court concluded that the passport and visa information, and its non-disclosure, were central to the asylum applications. It found that the Tribunal member would have decided the appeals differently if that information had been available. Justice Stewart refused the relief sought, leaving the Minister’s revocation decisions in place.