The High Court has refused the Minister for Justice and Equality a certificate needed to appeal an earlier judgment concerning the proposed deportation of MH and her minor daughter, SH.
The application, heard by Mr Justice Max Barrett, was brought under section 5(6) of the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking) Act 2000. The court said a certificate could be granted only if the earlier decision involved a point of law of exceptional public importance and an appeal was desirable in the public interest. Those requirements were cumulative, and the court had to apply them sparingly.
The earlier judgment, delivered in 2020, concerned deportation decisions made after the Minister refused an EU treaty rights application. The judgment recounted that MH, a Pakistani national, had lived with her UK national brother in England before coming with him to Ireland in 2014, where she and SH remained in County Offaly. DNA evidence later established that MH and her brother were blood relatives. The earlier court criticised the unexplained period of nearly 18 months between the deportation proposal and the decision to deport.
In seeking leave to appeal, the Minister argued that the earlier judgment had required the Minister to revisit the deportation decision after the DNA evidence, had accepted a fresh EU treaty rights application alongside submissions on deportation, and raised several points of exceptional public importance. Justice Barrett said the earlier judgment had made no such findings. It had expressly stated that revisiting the decision was not legally required and that the application to compel the grant of EU residence cards had not been made out.
The court also rejected the claim that the earlier judgment diverged from a previous High Court decision concerning deportation. It said the cases involved different facts and that the earlier judgment addressed the particular circumstances before it. The Minister had offered no evidence to support the submission that the ruling was likely to affect a large number of cases; counsel’s submissions alone were not evidence.
The proposed question about Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights did not arise on the facts, the court said, because SH was still a minor when the deportation decision was made. In any event, that point was additional to grounds that had already determined the earlier case, so answering it differently would not change the result.
The court refused the certificate. The decision concerns permission to appeal the earlier judgment; it does not decide the underlying deportation matters anew.