The High Court has refused an application by Jeff Okuomose Odeh, Rhoda Odeh and their minor son, Angelou Owen Odeh, for a certificate that would allow an appeal to the Court of Appeal on a point of law.
The applicants sought the certificate under section 5(6)(a) of the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking) Act 2000, as amended. They argued that their proposed question—whether the Keegan and O’Keeffe tests for unreasonableness are appropriate when assessing constitutional rights—was of exceptional public importance and that an appeal was desirable in the public interest.
The application followed a High Court judgment delivered on 4 June 2019. In the present judgment, delivered on 26 July 2019, Mr Justice David Keane considered whether the proposed question arose from that earlier decision and met the statutory certificate test.
The applicants relied on a passage from a Court of Appeal judgment in N.M. (D.R.C.) v Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, which said the old “no relevant material” standard for unreasonableness could not meet requirements for a thorough review in asylum matters involving constitutional or EU rights. They argued this conflicted with the test applied in the June judgment.
Justice Keane said the passage had been taken out of context. He explained that it concerned the older “no relevant material” or “no evidence” formulation of the O’Keeffe test. The judgment under challenge had applied the Keegan and O’Keeffe unreasonableness test as reformulated in the Supreme Court’s Meadows decision, he said. That approach, the judge noted, had also been addressed in earlier judicial review decisions.
The court concluded that there was no conflict between the test applied in the June judgment and the Court of Appeal’s statement about the older “no evidence” standard. Justice Keane was satisfied that the legal point proposed by the applicants did not arise from the judgment and that the law was not uncertain on the point. He therefore found it could not qualify as a point of exceptional public importance.
The application for a section 5 certificate was refused. This judgment decided only the certificate application; it did not grant an appeal.