The High Court has refused a Pakistani family’s application to quash deportation orders, finding that the constitutional rights they relied on had not been raised with the Minister and were not shown to require consideration in their circumstances.
Ms Justice Tara Burns delivered the judgment on 3 November 2020. The applicants were four Pakistani nationals, including two minors. They sought judicial review of deportation orders made on 21 June 2019 by the Minister for Justice and Equality. The court refused the relief sought and ordered the applicants to pay the respondent’s costs.
The family had entered Ireland between October 2015 and January 2016, and the youngest applicant was born in the State in November 2016. The judgment says none had permission to reside in Ireland and none had applied for international protection. The first applicant made two applications to be treated as a permitted family member of an EU citizen; both were refused. The Minister later considered deportation under section 3 of the Immigration Act 1999.
The Minister considered the statutory factors, the family’s representations and the effects of moving to Pakistan, including on the two minors. The Minister concluded that deportation was justified in the public interest, that there were no refoulement-related reasons preventing return, and that deportation would not breach the family’s rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Those were the Minister’s determinations, not findings made afresh by the court in this judicial review.
The family’s challenge argued that the Minister had failed to consider rights under Articles 40.1, 40.3, 41 and 42A of the Constitution. The judgment records that their statement of grounds asserted this failure without explaining how those rights were engaged. The judge invited counsel to develop the argument, but counsel did not do so.
The court held that a person facing deportation must bring relevant matters to the Minister’s attention through the representations process and cannot generally challenge a decision for failing to consider matters never raised. The judge noted that the family had legal representation and had made three sets of submissions, none referring to the constitutional rights later relied on. The court concluded that the applicants had not established that those rights should have been considered in their specific circumstances.
The ruling addressed the legality of the Minister’s decision-making process. The court did not substitute its own view on whether the family should be deported; it refused the application to quash the orders.