The High Court has dismissed a Pakistani man’s judicial review challenge to the Minister for Justice’s refusal to revoke his deportation order. The court held that the Minister could take account of both the birth of his child and his earlier evasion of immigration requirements, and found no legal basis to overturn the decision.
The judgment was delivered by Mr Justice Richard Humphreys on 19 November 2019. The applicant had arrived in Ireland in June 2011 and sought asylum. His application and subsequent appeal were refused. A later application for subsidiary protection was also refused, and a deportation order was made in August 2012.
The court said the applicant evaded presentation requirements for six years. He entered a relationship with an EU citizen, and their child was born in January 2016. The relationship ended, but a District Court order gave him limited access to the child.
In July 2018, the applicant’s solicitors sought revocation of the deportation order under section 3(11) of the Immigration Act 1999. The Minister refused in May 2019. The applicant was arrested in June and deported to Pakistan later that month. The High Court had granted leave for judicial review in July 2019. The main relief sought was to quash the refusal; the applicant did not pursue damages or seek a mandatory order.
The applicant argued that the Minister had not properly considered his representations, changed circumstances and the child’s best interests. The judge rejected those grounds. He said the decision acknowledged points in the applicant’s favour, including the child’s interests, but the absence of detailed discussion would not itself prove that submissions had been ignored. The court also found no breach of fair procedures.
The judgment said that, in reviewing a refusal to revoke an existing order, the Minister could weigh changed circumstances against other relevant factors, including matters that had not changed since the original order. The Minister was entitled to consider the applicant’s evasion and to give it significant weight. The judge said the child’s best interests were a primary consideration, but not automatically decisive, and found no exceptional circumstances had been shown that would make deportation a breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The court also noted that the applicant had not accounted for his whereabouts between 2012 and 2018 or provided copies of his current and expired passports. The judge said that lack of disclosure would have counted against relief on discretionary grounds even if a legal basis for relief had otherwise been established. The application was dismissed.