The High Court has refused an application by the State to dismiss a child’s judicial review proceedings as an abuse of process, but has not granted the child leave to bring the judicial review. It directed that the leave application be heard in early course alongside her father’s judicial review proceedings.
The child, identified in the judgment as A.L.M., is challenging a 10 January 2012 decision that she was not eligible for subsidiary protection. The Minister’s assessment treated her as a national of Sierra Leone and Rwanda, while recording doubts about her parents’ nationality and credibility. Her claim relied on her parents’ accounts of risks they said she would face if returned to either country.
The State argued that the child should be barred from proceeding because her case relied substantially on her mother’s account, which had been found lacking in candour in separate judicial review proceedings. In that earlier case, Cooke J. refused the mother leave to challenge decisions concerning her own protection claim. The earlier judgment addressed information linking the mother’s fingerprints to a Nigerian passport and a UK visit that she had not disclosed during the asylum process.
Justice McDermott found that the mother’s credibility issues were relevant to the child’s claim, but the cases were not identical. The child’s claim also depended significantly on her father’s separate account and his pending judicial review proceedings. The court held that issue estoppel did not bar the child: she was a separate applicant, and the mother and child were not privies for that purpose.
The court also declined to dismiss the child’s case as an abuse of process. It said the wider issues, including the father’s representations and the child’s rights, required consideration. The decision was limited to refusing the State’s dismissal application. The child’s leave application remains to be heard, and the court made no determination of the underlying challenge to the subsidiary protection refusal.