Case summaries
Asserting a violation of the procedural rules by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (‘OFPRA’) when a child’s legal representative or any ad hoc administrator was absent from a hearing, the National Court of Asylum (‘CNDA’) annulled OFPRA’s decision and sent the case back to it to be decided again under the correct circumstances.
The CNDA sets out the limits to the principle of family unity in such as it is not applicable to the child of a refugee, the refugee having obtained that status only through application of the said principle following her marriage with a refugee not being the father of the child.
Taking into account, on the one hand relevant facts applicable to the administration and on the other hand facts relevant to the personal situation of the applicant, the Council of State rejects an appeal directed against a court order from the Administrative Tribunal of Toulouse denying the applicant’s accommodation request due to the lack of urgency of the applicant’s situation.
A general circular letter send by Italian authorities is not a sufficient individual guarantee regarding a Dublin Transfer of a man suffering from various serious diseases.
Decision about the (provisional) taking care of an unaccompanied refugee minor and clarification of the steps to verify the age.
The transfer of “extra vulnerable” asylum seekers from the Netherlands to Italy is contrary to article 3 ECHR.
Arranging for medical or psychological examination is required, for example, when the third country national indicates that they were subject to violence, which left physical or mental signs which can be confirmed by medical or psychological examination. Not all invoked health problems will require an exam. Moreover, in subsequent proceedings this obligation is limited. The authority has no basis to arrange for such an examination when the event indicated in the subsequent application related to violence which was already subject to examination in the first asylum proceedings and was considered to not be credible.
The ECtHR found the detention of a homosexual asylum seeker in Hungary was arbitrary, in violation of Article 5(1) ECHR. In particular, the Court found that the Hungarian authorities had failed to make an individualised assessment and to take into account the applicant’s vulnerability in the detention facility based on his sexual orientation. The Court emphasised that the authorities should exercise special care when deciding on deprivation of liberty in order to avoid situations which may reproduce the plight that forced asylum seekers to flee in the first place.
This case dealt with the issue of whether the Secretary of State’s certification of the asylum claims of the two independent applicants as “clearly unfounded” was flawed on public law grounds, and the important difference between a decision on refugee status itself and a decision on a claim being “clearly unfounded”.
The Court of Appeal in Warsaw and the court of the first instance agreed that the detention of the applicant and her two children was unlawful from the moment the respective court decided on prolonging their detention as irregular migrants, although they have already applied for international protection.
Both courts agreed also that the amount of compensation for unlawful detention is dependent on the degree in which the state contributed to the trauma of the applicants and their inconvenience. In the present case, taking into account the available psychologists’ and psychiatrist’s opinions, the Courts decided that the poor health condition of the applicants was to a great extent caused by traumatic events experienced before coming to Poland – which eventually resulted in granting them refugee status.
However, the Court of Appeal decided to significantly increase the amount of compensation granted to the applicants, especially children, who were particularly vulnerable in this situation.
The detention of an asylum-seeker who claimed he had been tortured because of his sexual orientation was unlawful in part.