The High Court dismissed a Romanian national’s judicial review challenge to the Minister for Justice’s decision affirming removal and exclusion orders made against him. Mr Justice Richard Humphreys delivered judgment on 8 February 2018 in *Lingurar v Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform* [2018] IEHC 96.
The Minister proposed the orders on 30 March 2017 and made them on 12 July 2017. A review was sought, but the decisions were affirmed on 4 October 2017. The judicial review challenged that affirmation decision.
The applicant had entered Ireland in 2002 and had 14 convictions, the judgment said. He was sentenced to four years in prison in 2015 after pleading guilty to withholding information in connection with the killing of pub proprietor John Kenny. The manslaughter charge was withdrawn shortly after his trial began. The court noted that there had been no finding that the applicant was involved in the killing, but held that the Minister’s decision reasonably described him as involved in the robbery that led to it. The judge also found no error in the Minister’s account of the applicant’s convictions for theft and handling stolen property.
The applicant argued that the Minister had failed to consider the best interests of his child and that family rights outweighed the public interest in removal. The judge said no submission on the child’s best interests had been made at the review stage, so the argument could not be raised for the first time in judicial review. The judgment said the Minister had considered the family circumstances and was entitled to conclude that the pressing social need to remove and exclude the applicant outweighed family rights.
The court rejected the claim that the review process did not provide an effective remedy, finding that review of removal and exclusion orders involved a full examination of the facts and law. It also rejected the argument that the Minister could not rely on the withholding-information conviction because the offence was later declared unconstitutional. The applicant had pleaded guilty before that declaration, and the conviction stood, the judge said.
The court dismissed the action. The judgment records no separate order granting removal or exclusion; the challenge before the court was to the decision affirming those orders.