The High Court set aside the Minister for Justice and Equality’s 2017 refusal of a Pakistani man’s application for a residence card and remitted it for fresh consideration. Mr Justice Barr found that the decision-maker had not sufficiently examined evidence about the man’s relationship with his EU-citizen brother-in-law and their shared household.
The applicant sought certiorari of the review decision dated 25 April 2017. He argued that the Minister had wrongly combined the separate tests of dependency and membership of an EU citizen’s household, or had otherwise failed to apply the household test correctly. The court rejected the conflation argument: reading the review decision as a whole, it was not possible to conclude that the two criteria had been treated as one.
The judgment describes evidence that the applicant lived with his brother-in-law, Mr Ali, in Manchester from 2011, after travelling to the UK to study. He paid no rent, and Mr Ali paid at least £670 towards tuition fees. The applicant later travelled with Mr Ali to Ireland in 2014. The judgment says they continued living together, and that the applicant helped care for Mr Ali’s children and with other family matters. The applicant’s solicitor had said the application relied primarily on household membership, while some dependency evidence supported that claim.
The court found that the Minister had acknowledged some tuition payments but did not appear to account sufficiently for the evidence that the applicant had paid no rent in Manchester. The judge also said it was unclear whether the decision-maker had given sufficient regard to evidence of the applicant’s continuing role in the expanded household in Ireland, including a school principal’s letter about taking the children to school and evidence that he assisted his sister with translation. The judgment also referred to evidence that Mr Ali paid him for childcare.
Other relevant circumstances identified by the court included the applicant’s decision to leave the UK while he still had permission to stay and study, his age in relation to Mr Ali’s, and evidence about the family hierarchy and the applicant’s place in the household. The court said the review decision did not appear to give due consideration to the full extent of the living arrangements in Ireland.
The court was not satisfied that the required extensive examination of the applicant’s individual circumstances and relationship with Mr Ali had taken place. It therefore set aside the 25 April 2017 refusal and remitted the matter to the Minister for fresh consideration. The judgment did not grant a residence card or determine the application’s eventual outcome. The parties were given two weeks to make written submissions on the final order, costs and any further matters.