The High Court refused S. P. leave to seek judicial review of the refusal of her subsidiary protection application and a deportation order. In a judgment delivered on 20 January 2012, Mr Justice Cooke gave two reasons: the court’s discretion in light of what it found was a serious lack of candour, and delay without good reason to extend time.
S. P. had claimed to be a Sierra Leone national who came to Ireland in 2006 after threats and violence from an uncle who wanted her to marry a man. Earlier asylum decisions rejected her account as lacking credibility. The Minister refused subsidiary protection in February 2011 and made a deportation order in March 2011. Her judicial review application challenged both decisions and argued, among other things, that the Minister had relied unlawfully on the earlier credibility findings and had disregarded her submissions.
The court’s primary reason for refusing leave concerned information from the UK Border Agency. It said a woman whose fingerprints matched those held for S. P. had sought to enter the UK using a Nigerian passport in another name. S. P. accepted that she had voluntarily travelled to the UK with a boyfriend, but said this happened in 2003, lasted about a week and involved a false passport. She said she had not disclosed the trip during the asylum process because she was afraid and thought it irrelevant.
The judge found her explanation incomplete and concluded that the undisclosed trip was material to claims of persecution between 2000 and 2004. He said the earlier protection decisions had been made without that information and that allowing the proposed judicial review to proceed on the available record would be fundamentally false. The court declined to adjourn for inquiries into when and where her fingerprints had been taken.
The court also held that the application was out of time. S. P. had received the subsidiary protection refusal on 28 February 2011, but had not made the required ex parte application for leave; the court treated 3 October 2011, when the motion came before it, as the earliest date time could have stopped running. It found no good reason to extend the six-month period, noting that the application also had to be made promptly.
For the deportation order, the court said the application was outside the 14-day limit and found no basis to extend it. It rejected the argument that a separate High Court ruling about time limits under EU law justified an extension in this case. The judgment refused leave to seek judicial review; it did not determine the substantive legality of the two challenged decisions.