The High Court has refused the applicants leave to appeal its earlier dismissal of a challenge to a deportation order against Ivan Seredych.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys delivered the ruling on 23 April 2018. The application was made under section 5 of the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking) Act 2000. The deportation order, dated 8 February 2018, concerned the first-named applicant. The court had dismissed the application for certiorari in a judgment on 22 March 2018.
The applicants proposed five questions for appeal, concerning how Irish courts should treat European Court of Human Rights decisions, the consideration of constitutional family rights, whether constitutional proportionality must be assessed separately from Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and whether EU law points could be raised in court if they had not first been put to the Minister.
On the Strasbourg issue, the judge said courts must apply well-established case law and take due account of the principles in Strasbourg decisions. He said this did not require courts to follow every individual decision simply because some facts appeared similar. He also noted that section 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights Act 2003 had not been relied on at the original hearing.
The judge said the Minister had identified the applicants’ Article 41 rights, while the applicants’ asserted right to live together in Ireland was not itself a right to reside in the State. He described the proposed refinement of the relevant Court of Appeal decision as not raising a matter of exceptional public importance. On separate consideration of constitutional rights, he cited an existing Supreme Court decision and said an otherwise valid decision should not be quashed merely because issues were considered in a different order.
The judge also rejected the proposed questions about Article 21 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and Article 24(3) of the EU Charter. He said the points were not matters of exceptional public importance and that it was not in the public interest to appeal. He added that the EU law points had also been rejected on their merits in the earlier judgment.
The court’s order was limited to refusing leave to appeal. It did not determine a new challenge to the deportation order in this ruling.