The High Court has granted a mother and her three children leave to seek judicial review of their deportation orders on one narrow ground: whether the Minister for Justice personally considered if deporting them would breach the State’s non-refoulement obligations.
Mr Justice Cooke’s judgment, delivered on 17 May 2012, did not decide that the orders were invalid. It allowed the applicants to bring a review on that issue alone. The court refused leave to challenge the subsidiary protection refusals and rejected the other proposed grounds against the deportation orders.
The family, Nigerian nationals, had their asylum applications refused. The Refugee Appeals Tribunal rejected their account of events in Nigeria, citing discrepancies and inconsistencies. The mother had alleged that militants came to the family home in March 2007, later kidnapped her husband and eldest child, and beat and raped her. Those were allegations described in the judgment, not findings made in this judicial review ruling.
The Minister refused subsidiary protection in June 2011 and made deportation orders in September 2011. The court said the decisions and file examination memoranda showed that the decision makers had considered the family’s submissions and the relevant statutory factors. It found no basis to argue that country information had been selectively assembled or that the conclusions were irrational or unreasonable. It also rejected the argument that the subsidiary protection determination had mishandled the claim of past serious harm, noting the absence of corroborating evidence and the earlier credibility assessment.
The court refused an application to add a constitutional and human-rights challenge to the indefinite effect of deportation orders. It said the request came shortly before the hearing, after written submissions had been exchanged, and that the family had already been deported to Nigeria. The judgment said any challenge based on the effect of continued exclusion on the family’s particular circumstances could be considered after an application to revoke the orders and, if necessary, a challenge to a refusal.
The court also declined to recuse itself because it had earlier refused an injunction against deportation. Justice Cooke said that earlier ruling had not reached a definitive view on the judicial review grounds.
The leave granted was therefore confined to whether the Minister personally formed the opinion required by section 5 of the Refugee Act 1996 on non-refoulement. The court made no final determination of that question.