The High Court has refused an anonymised applicant’s judicial review challenge to the Minister for Justice’s refusal to grant permission to remain in Ireland. The court rejected all relief sought and awarded costs to the Minister.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as HK, challenged a July 2019 decision refusing his request for a review of an earlier refusal of permission to remain, as well as a deportation order made in August 2019. The case concerned a statutory review under section 49(7) of the International Protection Act 2015. The court’s judgment does not itself make a deportation order.
The applicant argued, among other things, that the record of his international protection interview did not meet statutory requirements, and that this invalidated later decisions. The court accepted that the original interview report omitted material required by section 35(13). However, it held that a later document could validly add the required assessment, even if prepared by an immigration protection officer other than the officer who made the protection recommendation. The court found that the section 49(7) review decision was legally valid.
The applicant also sought to add challenges to earlier decisions and reports. The court held that the section 39 report remained valid, since the relevant matters were addressed in that report. It declined to quash the earlier section 49(4) decision. The judge added that, even if the applicant’s arguments on those points were otherwise correct, the proposed challenges came too late: he had known of the report issue in July 2018 but sought to add the relief in July 2020, without explaining the delay.
In reviewing the Minister’s assessment of the applicant’s medical evidence and personal circumstances, the court found no established error. The Minister had considered the evidence, including a report recording PTSD and recommending specialist treatment, and had addressed Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and humanitarian considerations. The court said those conclusions were open to the Minister on the material presented.
The court also rejected the challenge concerning refoulement, finding that the Minister had considered the relevant facts and country information and that no new basis for the claim had been advanced in the review request. It found the reasons for refusing the review sufficiently clear, particularly because little additional information had been submitted. The court refused all relief and made an order for costs in favour of the Minister.