The High Court has dismissed a judicial review challenge to the refusal to revoke a deportation order against Michael Igbosonu, holding that the Minister’s decision did not warrant the court’s intervention.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys delivered the judgment on 4 October 2017. The proceedings were brought by Mr Igbosonu and his infant son, Mars Chidera Peters Igbonsonu, an Irish citizen, against the Minister for Justice and Equality, Ireland and the Attorney General.
The judgment records that Mr Igbosonu arrived in Ireland with his family in April 2007, aged about 17. In 2009, he was convicted of sexual assault and initially sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, with one year suspended. The Court of Criminal Appeal later increased the sentence to five years, with two years suspended. He was released from custody in April 2015.
A deportation order was made on 27 May 2016. Mr Igbosonu applied to have it revoked on 1 August 2016, relying in part on the rights of his child, who had not yet been born. The Minister refused that application. The child was born on 15 November 2016, and leave for the judicial review proceedings was granted on 3 January 2017.
The court said the child’s birth was the only matter that had changed since the deportation order. It rejected the argument that the Minister’s consideration of the earlier conviction during the revocation process allowed the applicants to challenge the original reliance on that conviction at this later stage.
The judge also considered the challenge on its merits in case that conclusion was wrong. He said the court could review the decision for issues including unreasonableness, disproportionality or factual or logical error, but could not substitute its own view for the Minister’s. The matters the applicants said had been overlooked—including the time since the offence, the applicant’s history in Ireland and the child’s circumstances—had been before the Minister, even if they were not all discussed in detail in the decision.
The judgment held that the Minister had carried out a proportionality assessment, including consideration of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the child’s best interests. The court found no basis for the argument that the child would be forced to leave Ireland or the European Union, and treated a separate argument based on the applicant’s possible future marriage as hypothetical.
The court dismissed the proceedings. It did not itself make a deportation order; the case concerned the refusal to revoke the existing order.