The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by a child and his parents over whether the parents could work in Ireland by exercising, on the child’s behalf, a labour-market access right linked to his international protection application.
The judgment, delivered by Ms Justice Power on 29 May 2024, held that Article 15 of the EU Reception Conditions Directive gives an applicant for international protection a labour-market access right in principle, subject to national law. But the right belongs to the applicant personally. It does not give a parent a right to work by proxy or a separate right derived from the child.
The child was born in April 2021. His parents, whose earlier protection applications had been refused, applied for protection on his behalf in July 2021. In November that year, each parent applied for labour-market access, arguing that they should be able to exercise the right available to their child. The applications were refused and the International Protection Appeals Tribunal upheld the refusals in March 2022.
The family brought judicial review proceedings. The High Court dismissed the case in March 2023, finding that the parents had no such vicarious or derived right. By then, the child had been granted international protection and the parents had received permission to reside and work. The Court of Appeal nevertheless proceeded with the appeal because it accepted that a claim for damages, if the refusal had been invalid, had a plausible basis.
The Court of Appeal said the child had an Article 15 right in principle, although any employment remained subject to Irish child-employment laws. It found that the Directive’s definition of an applicant did not include family members, and that the State’s obligations to provide adequate reception conditions for a child did not require the parents to receive work permission.
The court also rejected the parents’ reliance on the Zambrano principle, which concerns the rights of dependent children who are EU citizens. It found that the child was not an EU citizen and that denying his parents temporary labour-market access did not engage that principle. It said the constitutional case was also distinguishable from a precedent involving a person excluded from work for more than eight years: the parents’ claimed exclusion here lasted a little over eight months.
The court declined to refer a question to the Court of Justice of the European Union, finding no reasonable doubt about the meaning of Article 15. Because it found no right for the parents had been breached, their claim for Francovich damages failed. The appeal was dismissed. The court did not decide costs; it listed the matter for a brief hearing on 13 June 2024.