The High Court has ruled that the process used to revoke an anonymised Georgian man’s EU residence card was unfair because he and his EU citizen spouse had no oral interview or hearing before the decision was made. The court said the decision rested on adverse personal credibility findings, and ordered it quashed.
The judgment, delivered by Ms Justice Siobhán Phelan on 16 May 2022, arose from the Minister for Justice’s 2019 decision to revoke the man’s residence card. The Minister had concluded that his marriage to a Lithuanian citizen was one of convenience and that information about the couple’s residence together was false or misleading. A review affirmed that decision in February 2021.
The couple said they met online in 2016, married in Dublin in March 2017 and lived together until their relationship broke down. Their accounts differed over when the wife moved out: an April 2019 letter said October 2017, while a later submission said that date was a mistake and separation began in October 2018. The Minister’s concerns also included the short period between the man’s arrival in Ireland and the couple’s decision to marry, and questions about evidence of their shared residence.
The man argued that the review process was flawed because a letter requesting updated information arrived the day after the review decision, and because the decision appeared to question whether his wife lived in Ireland. The court rejected both arguments. It found the later letter was a clerical error, sent as part of an administrative mailshot, and did not show that the review decision-maker lacked information considered necessary. Reading the decision letter as a whole, the court also found that the concern was whether the couple lived together, not whether the wife resided in Ireland.
On the central issue, the court held that the Minister’s findings about a marriage of convenience and knowingly misleading information depended on an assessment of the couple’s credibility. Their account could be true and was not shown to be contradicted by objective evidence, but it had been disbelieved without any oral process. The judge said an interview or hearing would have allowed questions about the couple’s familiarity with each other and examination of evidence, including messages and utility bills.
The court concluded that fair procedures required an opportunity for the applicant and his spouse to be assessed through a face-to-face meeting or hearing. It ordered certiorari quashing the residence-revocation decision. The judgment did not itself determine that the marriage was genuine or grant a residence card.