The High Court has refused an applicant leave to bring a judicial review challenge to an International Protection Appeals Tribunal decision rejecting her claim for refugee status or subsidiary protection based on her race in South Africa.
In a ruling delivered on 28 March 2025, Ms Justice Siobhán Phelan said the applicant had not established substantial grounds for the proposed challenge. The court considered only whether the case could proceed to a full hearing; it did not decide the underlying judicial review claim.
The applicant, anonymised in the ruling as A.S., is a South African national who arrived in Ireland in March 2022 and applied for international protection the following month. She alleged that, as a white South African, she had suffered persecution or serious harm and would face such harm if returned. The tribunal rejected her application in November 2024, finding that her experiences, though unpleasant, did not meet the threshold for persecution.
By the leave hearing, the applicant was pursuing one ground: that the tribunal had failed in its duty to cooperate in assessing her claim by relying on country-of-origin information that was not up to date. Her case focused on whether more recent reports could have affected the tribunal’s assessment of the availability of state protection, particularly police effectiveness.
The proceedings were filed 35 days after the statutory 28-day period. The applicant’s solicitor attributed the delay to a barrister’s unavailability and a brief that remained in draft in the solicitor’s office email. The judge said the explanation was incomplete, including because the solicitor had not explained why she did not follow up before the deadline. However, the court allowed the applicant to proceed at the leave stage on the basis that she could present a reasonable case for extending time at a full hearing. The judge did not decide whether an extension should ultimately be granted.
The judge found the evidence about newer reports insufficiently specific and comparative. For example, she said the cited Freedom House reports showed no change in relevant police-effectiveness scores, and the overall score for South Africa remained 79 out of 100. The applicant had not identified material aspects of a newer US report that were absent from the earlier report considered by the tribunal. The judge also noted that a point about Equality Courts in the newer report was already in information referenced in the tribunal’s decision.
The ruling concluded that the applicant had not provided a sufficient evidential basis to show an arguable, material difference between the information the tribunal used and the newer information she said it should have considered. Leave to seek judicial review was therefore refused.