The High Court refused a Nigerian mother and daughter leave to seek judicial review of decisions refusing them subsidiary protection and making deportation orders. It also refused to extend the time to challenge earlier Refugee Appeals Tribunal decisions that upheld the rejection of their asylum applications.
Mr Justice Hedigan delivered the judgment on 16 January 2009. The applicants had brought proceedings on 13 October 2008, more than a year after the Tribunal decisions were notified. The court said the statutory deadline for challenging those decisions was 14 days. It found the explanations offered for the delay insufficient and not exceptional, and declined to extend time. The court therefore did not consider whether the Tribunal should be removed from the proceedings on the separate basis that its decisions had been absorbed into the Minister’s later decisions.
The mother’s account, as summarized in the judgment, was that she feared being forced to undergo genital circumcision in Nigeria and had suffered pressure and violence after refusing the procedure. Her daughter was born in Ireland in 2006 and is a Nigerian national. The mother applied for asylum in 2006, and later made a separate application for her daughter. The Refugee Applications Commissioner rejected both applications; the Tribunal upheld those decisions in 2007.
The applicants argued that the Minister had relied irrationally on country information about Nigeria, failed to assess whether state protection was adequate, breached their rights to private and family life, and failed to give proper consideration to the child’s interests. The respondents said the decisions were lawful and that the country information had been carefully considered.
The court found that the Minister’s conclusions on state protection and relocation were consistent with the country information considered. It also rejected the claim that the Minister had breached Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, noting that the decision-maker had considered the applicants’ circumstances and concluded that deportation would not reach the level of severity needed to engage Article 8.
On the child’s interests, the judge said the decision-maker did not have to use a specific formula to show that they had been considered. The judgment noted that the case did not involve a proposed separation of mother and daughter; the Minister was entitled to presume the mother would take her daughter with her if deported.
The court found no prima facie case against the subsidiary protection decisions and no substantial grounds to challenge the deportation orders. It refused leave to apply for judicial review. The ruling concerned permission to bring the challenge; it was not a full judicial review hearing.