The High Court dismissed a Nigerian man’s judicial review challenge to a deportation order, finding that he had not shown the Minister for Justice and Equality’s decision was unlawful. The judge said it was unnecessary to decide whether to extend the time for bringing the challenge because it failed on its merits.
The applicant arrived in Ireland in 2007 as a 14-year-old unaccompanied minor and spent four years in State care. His asylum application and appeal were rejected. A separate application for leave to remain based on the CJEU’s Zambrano judgment was refused in June 2014, and subsidiary protection was refused in May 2015. The court said his presence in the State was unlawful from that point.
A deportation order was made on 25 August 2017. The applicant applied for its revocation under section 3(11) of the Immigration Act 1999 in October 2017, then obtained leave to challenge the order by judicial review. He had a daughter in 2009. The judgment records that she lived with her mother in Tallaght and that the applicant had seen her four times in the four months before the hearing, including twice after the deportation order. The applicant also recently found accommodation through a church in Naas and was working on a community service placement.
The court considered the applicant’s arguments about proportionality, family rights, his time in Ireland, accommodation difficulties, his criminal record and alleged errors in the Minister’s analysis. The judge said the applicant had never held a positive permission to remain beyond the precarious status arising while protection claims were considered, and was an “unsettled migrant” under the relevant case law. In those circumstances, the court said deportation would breach his Article 8 rights only in very exceptional circumstances, which it found were not established.
The judgment records that the applicant pleaded guilty in 2014 to assault causing harm, violent disorder and possession of stolen property arising from a 2010 Temple Bar incident. He received a two-year suspended sentence and 240 hours of community service. The court also referred to a 2017 criminal damage conviction and a passport-related charge pending at the time of judgment. It said the Minister was entitled to weigh the public interest against the family rights the applicant could assert, and that the court’s role was to review legality rather than make its own proportionality assessment.
The judge noted that the challenge appeared to be out of time: it should have been brought within 28 days of the deportation order, and the revocation application was itself made outside that period. But he did not decide whether to extend time. The order was that the judicial review application be dismissed on the merits.