The High Court has refused an Albanian applicant’s request to postpone her International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) hearing while she appeals an earlier refusal of a stay.
In a judgment delivered on 17 September 2018, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys refused the application. The proposed appeal concerned his 10 September refusal to pause the IPAT hearing until test cases addressed whether the International Protection Office (IPO) could use contractors to assess protection claims. The judge assumed, for the purpose of deciding this application, that an appeal to the Court of Appeal properly lay without first seeking certification.
The applicant arrived in Ireland on 19 September 2015 and applied for asylum two days later. Her application was rejected. After an appeal to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, the subsidiary protection aspect was returned to the IPO under the International Protection Act 2015. The IPO rejected that application on 6 June 2018. The applicant appealed the asylum and subsidiary protection decisions to IPAT on 26 June; the hearing was due on 24 September 2018. She filed judicial review proceedings on 4 July, seeking primarily to have the IPO decision quashed.
The judge said the reasons given in his earlier judgment in N.A. v Chief International Protection Officer applied to this application. The applicant’s barrister, Paul O’Shea, did not offer a meaningful reason why those findings should not apply, the judgment said, but argued that they were wrong. The respondents’ solicitor, Dara O’Loughlin, adopted submissions made at the earlier hearing and supported the reasoning in N.A.
The court considered the possible harm if the judicial review challenge became moot, the delay to the applicant’s appeal, the operation of the 2015 Act, and IPAT’s ability to organise its work and avoid a backlog. The judge said the applicant’s submissions did not outweigh those considerations. He also rejected an equality argument that her case should be stayed because a test case had been stayed, saying test cases were objectively distinct because they had been selected for separate treatment.
The court’s order was limited to refusing a stay of the IPAT hearing. It did not determine the judicial review challenge to the IPO decision or the underlying asylum and subsidiary protection appeals.