By Ruth Mercer
The High Court has upheld the refusal of a Somali refugee’s application to bring a woman he says is his wife to Ireland under the family reunification provisions of the International Protection Act 2015.
The applicant, identified as N.K.S., arrived in Ireland in 2018 and was granted refugee status in November 2021. He applied in February 2022 for family reunification with Ms X, saying they had married by proxy in Somalia in November 2016 while he was living in Sweden.
The application became complicated by two conflicting marriage certificates. A certificate previously submitted during his international protection process was issued by Galkaio District Court and dated July 2016. The applicant later said that document was inauthentic and contained errors.
For the family reunification application he relied instead on a Shibis District Court certificate recording a November 2016 marriage. The two documents named different officials and witnesses.
The Minister refused the application in September 2023 and upheld that decision on review in October 2024. The Minister considered the conflicting certificates unreliable and also sought other evidence showing that a valid marriage existed and remained subsisting.
Mr Justice Cian Ferriter held that the Minister was entitled to question both certificates. Country information before the decision-maker showed that Somalia lacked a reliable central marriage-registration system, while the applicant had himself accepted that one apparently official certificate was not authentic.
The judge also rejected the argument that the Minister had unlawfully investigated the quality of the couple’s relationship. He found that requests for WhatsApp messages and other evidence were directed at establishing the fact of a valid and subsisting marriage after doubts arose about the certificates.
Evidence included communications between the couple from 2022 and an affidavit from Ms X. However, the court held that the Minister could reasonably find that this did not amount to sufficient independent or objective proof of the marriage.
The ruling does not decide that no marriage exists. It establishes that the Minister’s refusal, on the evidence presented, was legally permissible. The judicial review application was refused.