The High Court has refused a judicial review brought by five Pakistani nationals challenging decisions that upheld the refusal of their applications for residence cards as family members of a British citizen living in Ireland.
Mr Justice David Keane gave judgment on 4 July 2019. The applicants were the British citizen’s parents-in-law, two brothers-in-law and uncle-in-law. The Minister for Justice had refused the applications in 2015, and review decisions made in March 2017 affirmed those refusals. The applicants sought orders quashing the five review decisions.
The court rejected the applicants’ challenge to the tests applied to the parents-in-law. They argued that the Minister had wrongly assessed them under the rules for “permitted family members” and had considered dependence in the United Kingdom rather than Ireland. The judge concluded that the governing transitional provisions required the applications to be assessed under the 2006 regulations, and that the Minister had applied the correct test for qualifying family members: dependence on the Union citizen’s spouse in the country from which the applicants had come.
The brothers-in-law and uncle-in-law argued that the Minister wrongly required them to prove “sole” dependence. The judge found that the review decisions addressed the applicants’ own claims of being wholly and solely dependent, and did not show that the Minister had applied the wrong legal test. He said the central question was whether the claimed dependence on the British citizen was genuine, rather than whether support was necessary to meet the applicants’ essential needs. The applicants had not provided evidence equivalent to statements of their personal means, the judgment said.
The applicants also argued that the Minister had failed to give adequate reasons. The judge accepted that the reasons in the review letters, considered alone, would have been inadequate. But he concluded that, in the particular circumstances, the reasons could be inferred from the decisions and their context. He also considered the Minister’s file reports and review-officer decisions, which were disclosed during the proceedings, and found no breach capable of invalidating the decisions.
The court therefore rejected all three grounds and refused the application for judicial review. It did not grant the requested orders quashing the review decisions.