The High Court has dismissed an application by three anonymised applicants for leave to appeal a previous ruling that refused to quash an immigration review decision and related deportation orders.
In a judgment delivered on 8 July 2019, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys considered two proposed questions said to be of exceptional public importance. The applicants challenged a review decision made under section 49(9) of the International Protection Act 2015. The earlier judgment, delivered on 28 May 2019, had refused judicial review relief.
The first proposed question concerned whether the Minister could meet the obligation to consider an applicant’s family life under section 49(3) merely by setting out the statutory criteria. The judge said that formulation did not reflect his earlier finding: the Minister had considered the factors, and the applicants had not produced evidence to displace that conclusion. The review decision referred to the section 49 factors and expressly stated that the case had been considered under sections 49 and 50. The court had also read the review decision alongside the original section 49 decision, which discussed aspects of the applicants’ family life.
The judge said the applicants had made no submissions on family life under that heading before the decision-maker, so they could not seek to quash the decision on that basis. He also found the proposed question was fact-specific and unsuitable for leave to appeal. A separate point about the adequacy of reasons had not been captured in the proposed question and, in any event, was not substantial on the circumstances described.
The second proposed question asked whether the Minister had confused the section 49 assessment with the Article 8 European Convention on Human Rights test. The judge said the decision treated section 49 and Article 8 as separate considerations. He rejected the applicants’ reliance on an isolated sentence as taking it out of context, and said the issue was fact-specific. He also noted that the applicants had not made submissions on this point to the decision-maker.
The court dismissed the leave application. The judgment did not reopen the earlier refusal of judicial review or determine a substantive appeal; it decided only whether leave to appeal should be granted.