The Court of Appeal has allowed the State’s appeal against a High Court order quashing a refusal to revoke a deportation order against a man from Cameroon.
The appeal concerned a decision under section 3(11) of the Immigration Act 1999. The deportation order itself was not under challenge. The Court of Appeal said the High Court’s review of the Minister’s decision was necessarily narrow because the underlying order had not been challenged.
The man’s partner, a woman from Morocco, and their child had permission to remain in Ireland. The child was born in the State in 2013. The couple were not legally married, and the judgment records that they had not shown that they could not live together in Morocco or Cameroon.
The Minister refused the man’s 2014 application to revoke the deportation order, which had been made in 2006. The High Court later quashed that refusal, finding that the Minister had acted irrationally and breached family rights by allowing the mother and child to remain while affirming the order against the father.
The Court of Appeal found that the High Court’s reasoning rested on a mistaken view that the parents had equally precarious legal status. At the relevant time, the man was in Ireland unlawfully under an existing deportation order, while the woman and child had Stamp 4 permission. Their legal positions were “radically different”, the appeal court said, and the Minister was entitled to treat them differently.
The court also rejected the High Court’s requirement that the Minister identify a “compelling reason” before the State’s interests could outweigh the family’s rights. It said the Minister’s decision had addressed the relevant facts and balanced the respondents’ interests against those of the State, including immigration control. The Court of Appeal found no basis for the High Court’s conclusions that the decision was irrational or breached rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights or the Constitution.
The court allowed the appeal. The judgment does not itself revoke the deportation order; it overturns the High Court’s order quashing the refusal to revoke it.