The High Court has quashed deportation orders against a Pakistani mother and her daughter, finding that the Minister for Justice’s decision-making was legally flawed, incomplete and unreasonable.
Mr Justice Max Barrett said the Minister’s deliberations remained “inchoate” because the applicants’ March 2017 submissions had received only an acknowledgement, while the reviewer’s report said their representations were still being considered. The court held that the deportation orders could not stand.
The judgment concerned a mother, MH, and her daughter, SH, who had come to Ireland with MH’s brother in July 2014 after living with him in the United Kingdom. The brother is a UK national. The applicants said he had supported MH after her husband died and that they remained dependent on him. DNA tests arranged by the applicants in February 2019 confirmed that MH and her brother were full siblings and that MH was SH’s biological mother. The tests took place after the decision under challenge.
The court criticised the Minister’s failure to take up the applicants’ earlier offer to provide DNA evidence at their own expense. It said the reviewer had not properly considered evidence of the family relationship, the applicants’ residence and education in Ireland, their community ties, or the humanitarian consequences of returning them to Pakistan. The judge also found that the review did not properly assess their private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that the delay of about 18 months before the deportation orders adversely affected their rights.
The court concluded that the Minister had erred in law, that the deportation decision was unreasonable, and that proper regard had not been given to relevant provisions of the Immigration Act 1999, the International Protection Act 2015, Article 8, or the welfare of SH as a minor.
The judgment did not decide that the applicants qualified for EU residence cards. The judge said the deadline to challenge the February 2017 refusal of their EU treaty rights application had expired, and that the requested order compelling the grant of residence cards had not been made out and could not be granted. The court said the Minister could properly revisit that refusal in light of the DNA evidence, but was not legally required to do so. It granted certiorari quashing the deportation orders.