Case summaries

The High Court refused leave to apply for judicial review of a deportation order on the grounds that the decision of the Minister for Justice was reasonable.

The case refers to an appeal before the High National Court brought by the Appellant against the decision of the Central Court for Contentious-Administrative Proceedings to uphold the Ministry of the Interior’s denial of asylum.

The Appellant is a Nigerian national.In the application she claimed that when her father died, she was left in debt to the chief of the tribe to which they belonged.In order to settle the debt, the Applicant was forced to marry the tribal chief and was kept as a prisoner.

Therefore, the High National Court upheld the Applicant’s appeal as it deemed the situation suffered by women in Nigeria, and particularly forced marriage, constitutes a form of persecution for membership of a particular social group.

A mother of two children was recognised as a refugee as there was sufficient probability of her being forced to undergo sterilisation in China due to violation of the one child policy. Forced sterilisation constitutes a violation of the basic human right to physical integrity and human dignity to such an extent that it is without doubt relevant under Section 60 (1) of the Residence Act. / Art 1 A 2 of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The Helsinki Administrative Court held that the applicant was not considered at risk of persecution as it was unlikely that the Iranian authorities were aware of the applicant’s extramarital affair and the applicant was able to rely on her friends for support in different parts of Iran.

The Helsinki Administrative Court held that the applicant was not considered at risk of persecution as it was unlikely that the Iranian authorities were aware of the applicant’s extramarital affair and the applicant was able to rely on her friends for support in different parts of Iran.

The Court found that the province of Ghazni, Afghanistan was still unstable and unsafe for the local population due to the presence of an internal armed conflict. However the security situation in Kabul had not deteriorated to the extent to be classified as an internal armed conflict.

The case concerned an appeal against a decision of the Ministry of Interior (MOI) to refuse a claim for subsidiary protection status on the grounds that the applicant was excluded as a result of his activities, which were considered ‘contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.’ The appeal was successful, the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) held that exclusion clauses must be interpreted restrictively, that there must be ‘serious grounds to believe’ such acts were carried out and notwithstanding the exclusion clause, non refoulement obligations under Art 3 of the ECHR apply.

The Helsinki Administrative Court held that returning a single mother with her two children to Malta to the conditions described and investigated, among others, in a UN Report of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Mission to Malta, and on the European Parliament’s LIBE Committee report on Maltese detention centres may cause the family to face inhuman treatment.

Applying Art 4.4 of the Qualification Directive, the Council for Alien Law Litigation (CALL) held that the mere finding that persecution has ceased in the country of origin, without showing that there are no good reasons to consider that such persecution will not be repeated, is insufficient to reject an application for asylum.

The Court of Appeal concluded that the Tribunal must make a best interest of the child determination in considering an asylum appeal made by an unaccompanied minor. Further, that although the Secretary of State has a duty to trace the applicant’s family under the Reception Conditions Directive, this duty exists independently of the obligation to appropriately consider an asylum claim. Therefore the Secretary of State’s failure to act on the basis of the duty is not a ground on which an asylum appeal could be allowed.