The High Court has decided that two applicants and the Minister for Justice will each pay their own legal costs following test cases over delays in deciding citizenship applications.
MJ and AA had unsuccessfully sought orders compelling the Minister to decide their applications for naturalisation. In an earlier judgment, the court found that delays of about 40 months in MJ’s case and 41 months in AA’s case did not amount to a wrongful refusal to make a decision or to delays so serious that they should legally be treated as refusals.
The separate costs judgment concerned who should pay for that litigation.
Both applicants argued that their cases had been selected as pathfinder or test cases capable of resolving issues arising in a much larger group of proceedings. The court was told that a holding list contained approximately 158 other cases as of April 4, 2026.
The Minister, who had succeeded in the underlying proceedings, sought costs against both applicants. Under the usual rule, a successful party is presumptively entitled to recover costs.
Mr Justice Conleth Bradley accepted that the two judicial review cases qualified as public interest litigation and that all sides had generally treated them as pathfinder cases selected from a larger group of pending claims.
However, he rejected the applicants’ separate argument that they should recover part of their own costs from the State. He distinguished these cases from test litigation resolving uncertain legislation, finding that the principal judgment instead applied established legal principles governing mandamus — the remedy used to seek an order compelling a public authority to perform a legal duty.
The judge nevertheless exercised his discretion not to order the unsuccessful applicants to pay the Minister’s costs because of the representative role their cases had played.
The ruling settles costs only. Each party must bear its own legal expenses. The earlier refusal of the applicants’ judicial review claims remains unchanged, although by the costs hearing both applicants had separately received confirmation that their citizenship applications had been approved in principle.