The High Court has rejected a Zimbabwean man’s judicial review challenge to a decision refusing him permission to remain in Ireland and the deportation order that followed. It refused the relief he sought and ordered him to pay the respondents’ costs.
The judgment, delivered by Ms Justice Tara Burns on 9 September 2021, concerned a review under section 49(7) of the International Protection Act 2015 and a deportation order made under section 51. The man had challenged those decisions on one ground: that the Minister wrongly relied on earlier protection findings made using a different standard of proof when assessing whether he faced a serious risk of prohibited treatment if returned to Zimbabwe.
The man had claimed to fear the Chipangano group, a Zanu PF faction, and other named figures. He said he had witnessed killings and had been abducted and tortured. The International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) found inconsistencies and a lack of detail in his account, rejected his core claim as not credible, and recommended that he receive neither refugee status nor subsidiary protection. It accepted that he was a Shona man from Harare, but found no reasonable chance of persecution and no substantial grounds for believing he faced serious harm in Zimbabwe.
The Minister refused permission to remain in February 2018. In February 2020, after reviewing that decision, the Minister again refused permission to remain and concluded that there had been no material change relevant to refoulement. A deportation order followed in March 2020. The man had made no new submissions about refoulement for the review. The court said the review was not a fresh appeal and that the original permission decision remained valid because it was not challenged.
The court held that the Minister could rely on the earlier findings when considering refoulement, while still having regard to relevant information from the protection claim. It found no evidential basis to show that the Minister had failed to consider the facts. On the pleaded ground, it ruled that the balance-of-probabilities standard used to establish facts did not prevent the Minister from applying the serious-risk test to those facts.
At the hearing, the man’s counsel also argued that the Minister had failed to give reasons, had not addressed the issues, and should have considered refoulement at a later stage. The court said those grounds were outside the judicial-review leave granted and it had no jurisdiction to decide them. It nevertheless commented that the statutory scheme allowed the refoulement decision to be made with the permission-to-remain decision, and that the reasons were clear when the two Ministerial decisions were read together. The court also said the unpleaded arguments would not have succeeded on the material before it.