The High Court has quashed the refusal of a Somali refugee’s application to bring his mother and four siblings to Ireland, finding that the Minister’s agents had no objective basis for deciding that his financial support was insufficient to establish dependency. The matter was remitted to the Minister for fresh consideration.
The judicial review was heard on 1 November 2012. The applicant, whose identity is anonymised in the judgment, had been recognised as a refugee in 2007. He applied for family reunification in January 2010 under section 18(4) of the Refugee Act 1996. He said his family lived in an internally displaced persons camp in Somalia and depended on money he sent. He submitted transfer receipts and photographs, but said he could not obtain birth certificates because of conditions in Somalia.
The application was refused on 9 January 2012. The decision cited the lack of documents proving family relationships, the photocopied receipts, the amount transferred, the delay before applying and the family members’ ages. It treated the central issue as whether the relatives were financially dependent on the applicant. The Minister’s agents considered the transfers, totalling €2,830 from September 2009 to May 2011, insufficient to establish dependency for five people.
The applicant argued that the assessment relied on irrelevant assumptions and failed to account for conditions in the camp. The Minister argued that the applicant had to prove dependency and had supplied no evidence about his family’s daily living conditions or the local cost of living.
Justice M. Clark said the family’s ability to support themselves in Ireland was not relevant to whether they were dependent on the applicant in Somalia. That question concerned whether they relied on his means and support for subsistence in their circumstances in their country of residence. If dependency were established, the Minister could separately consider other factors when deciding whether to exercise discretion to allow them to enter and reside in Ireland. The court did not decide that the family should be admitted.
The judgment found that the investigation had not examined the family’s actual conditions in the camp, their ability to earn or barter, or the effect of the remittances in that setting. Nor had the decision identified a benchmark for deciding what amount would meet the dependency test. The court held that the refusal could not stand without objective information providing a rational basis for the finding.
The court quashed the 9 January 2012 decision and remitted the application to the Minister for fresh consideration. It did not set guidelines for how the Minister must exercise discretion. The judgment also called for clearer guidance on assessing dependency in family reunification cases.