Case summaries

The reception conditions for beneficiaries of international protection in Bulgaria are such that they may face severe material deprivation due to “indifference” on the part of the authorities (cfr. CJEU, Ibrahim), potentially amounting to a violation of Article 3 ECHR / Article 4 CFREU.

When the State Secretary decides that a request for international protection is not admissible, because the applicants have refugee status in Bulgaria, it is not sufficient for him to refer to the principle of mutual trust between EU Member States and to the Council of State’s jurisprudence, but he is obliged to examine the applicant’ s individual circumstances and to obtain specific information and guarantees from the Bulgarian authorities.

To not allow young adults who have been refused asylum to terminate their studies deprives Article 8 ECHR of all weight, an Article which protects an individual’s professional training and personal development.  Even if the right to stay of a student is not protected by Article 8, the termination of a qualifying training which is on the horizon falls under the scope of private life within the ECHR. Therefore, the transfer of the applicant to a return centre would prevent her from finishing her schooling, ruining her 7 years of studies and would constitute a harm difficult to repair.

Where an asylum application is made by an unaccompanied child, the tribunal must take into consideration the best interests of the child in its examination (for example, education). The decision includes a presumption of minority that the tribunal must rebut in order to allow for the transfer of the applicant. 

In this case, the Supreme Court allowed the State’s appeal against a High Court Judgment in which the Refugee Appeals Tribunal was found to have erred in law in its approach to determining persecution. The Supreme Court allowed the State’s appeal on the basis that the tribunal member’s finding of no risk of persecution was not unreasonable (within the applicable standards of judicial review) and that the High Court was incorrect in finding that the extent of educational discrimination at issue in this case met the threshold of persecution required.

The ECtHR ruled that the Greek authorities had failed in their positive obligation under Article 8 ECHR to guarantee that the applicant’s asylum request is examined within a reasonable time in order to ensure that his situation of insecurity, which impinges upon several elements of his private life, is as short-lived as possible. 

Tigere (T) appealed against a decision that the legislation which prevented her from obtaining a student loan was compatible with her human right to education under Article 2 Protocol 1 and Article 14 ECHR. To qualify for a loan, the legislation specified that a student had to (a) be settled (i.e. not subject to immigration laws/restrictions) in the UK when the academic year began; (b) be ordinarily resident in England; (c) been ordinarily resident (i.e. “lawfully”) in the UK for the three years before the start of the course; and (d) their residence in the UK under ‘(c)’ was not at any point for full-time education. T was judged not to have met criteria (a) and (c).

A decision refusing refugee status is unlawful and arbitrary, if it is solely based on the lack of a “western orientated” lifestyle of the applicants in the country of residence and disregards the lack of educational opportunities in the country of origin. Furthermore, such determination violates the right to equal treatment of foreigners with each other.

After six and a half years of single asylum proceedings, the Applicants, a family with three children who were well-integrated in Austria, , were expelled by the Asylum Court to Armenia. The Constitutional Court revoked this decision on the grounds of a violation of Art 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The reasons for this were primarily that the integration of the children was given insufficient weight.