The Supreme Court has asked the EU’s highest court to decide whether permanent residence obtained through material fraud can be revoked without a separate assessment of the personal consequences for the applicant.
The case concerns Muhammad Imran, a Pakistani national who arrived in Ireland on a student visa by April 2004. He married Hungarian national Evelin Lango in January 2011 and obtained a residence card that July on the basis that she was exercising EU free-movement rights in Ireland.
Imran applied for permanent residence in May 2016. To establish the required five years of qualifying residence, he submitted documents including invoices purporting to show that Lango was working as a self-employed childminder into May 2016. He was granted permanent residence in July 2016.
The Minister later found that most of those invoices were fraudulent. During a review, Imran’s representatives said Lango had left Ireland in January 2016. The Minister concluded that the records had been submitted to make it appear that she remained in Ireland and exercised EU rights for the full qualifying period. Imran has not challenged that finding of fraud in these proceedings.
The remaining dispute is legal. Article 35 of the EU Citizenship Directive allows rights to be withdrawn in cases of fraud or abuse, but requires any measure to be proportionate.
The Supreme Court considered the stronger interpretation to be that proportionality concerns the relationship between the fraud and the revocation. On that view, deliberately falsifying records central to obtaining permanent residence justified revocation without examining Imran’s length of residence, integration or other personal circumstances.
However, the court accepted that another interpretation is reasonably possible: Article 35’s references to procedural safeguards could require a broader individual assessment of the impact of revocation.
Because the Supreme Court is a court of final instance and the EU law point has not been authoritatively resolved, it referred the issue to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The Irish proceedings are stayed pending that ruling.