The High Court has temporarily restrained the deportation of an anonymised applicant while his judicial review challenge proceeds, citing an unexplained delay of more than four years in deciding his application for leave to remain and the State’s retention of his passport.
Mr Justice Mac Eochaidh made the interlocutory order on 13 July 2015. The applicant is challenging the Minister for Justice and Equality’s refusal, sent in February 2015, to revoke a deportation order. The court had granted him leave to seek judicial review and an interim injunction in March. At the injunction hearing, the alleged legal defects in the Minister’s decision were not explored; the issue was whether the circumstances justified temporary protection from deportation.
The judgment recounts that the applicant’s leave-to-remain application followed a 2009 proposal to deport him. Submissions later relied on his relationship with an Irish citizen, identified in the judgment as Ms Caroline Greene, and their stated intention to marry. The court said they believed they could not marry without his original Nigerian passport, which the authorities had retained. The applicant’s solicitors had repeatedly sought its return. The passport was returned only shortly before the hearing and was out of date; the court was told it would likely need renewal for deportation.
The State took four years and five months to decide the leave-to-remain application, with no explanation for the delay offered to the court. The judge also found no satisfactory explanation for retaining the passport after officials had said it would be returned once that application concluded. On the balance of probabilities, he accepted that the couple would have married had the passport been returned at an appropriate time, and that a different revocation application would then have been made. He noted that marriage would not necessarily have led the Minister to revoke the deportation order.
The court accepted evidence that Ms Greene had suffered three miscarriages and that she could not relocate to Nigeria. However, the judge stressed that disruption of the romantic relationship was not the basis for granting the injunction, and that such disruption would not normally be enough on its own.
The order is interlocutory: it restrains deportation while the judicial review is pending. The judgment does not decide whether the refusal to revoke the deportation order was lawful or require the Minister to revoke it.