The High Court refused bail on 4 February 2020 to an anonymised applicant detained ahead of a planned deportation, holding that bail would be inappropriate after an injunction had been refused.
The applicant, identified in the judgment as F.R. aka J.S. (Pakistan), was due to be deported at 2pm on 5 February. The court heard the bail application under section 5(7) of the Immigration Act 1999, as substituted by section 78 of the International Protection Act 2015. The application also renewed a request for an injunction pending the proceedings, which had been refused the previous day in a separate judgment.
The judicial review had been listed for a full hearing on 3 February. When it was called late that afternoon, the applicant sought an adjournment to apply to amend her case and extend time. The judge granted the adjournment and dealt only with the injunction application, which was refused. The substantive application, as amended, was then listed for 11 February.
The judgment records that the applicant was taken into custody by GNIB members at about 6.15pm on 3 February and was in the Dóchas Centre when the bail application was heard. Her solicitor said she collapsed when told she would be detained and said she did not have her medication. The judgment says she was told she would receive medical attention in prison. Those matters were recorded as the solicitor’s account; the court’s decision concerned bail and did not determine the substantive judicial review.
For the applicant, counsel argued that bail and injunction applications were different processes, that statutory protections applied and that the applicant had a statutory right to apply for bail. The judge said the existence of jurisdiction to grant bail did not itself justify exercising it. In general, the court said, bail for a person detained for imminent deportation was inappropriate where the person did not meet the test for an interlocutory injunction, particularly where an injunction had already been refused. Granting bail in those circumstances, the judge said, would amount to granting an injunction by another means.
The court refused the bail application. The judgment did not decide the substantive challenge, which remained listed for hearing on 11 February.