[Part of a High Court Judicial review into the case of A Sudanese doctor who was refused asylum in Ireland]
The Refugee Appeals Tribunal.
They’ve done it again.
Mark Dennehy writes:
Judicial review judgements are generally dry documents, if important ones – you refer to them but you don’t generally find one you have trouble putting down while reading.
So when the High Court starts off a Judicial Review by saying “Sometimes the Court is called upon to review a decision which is so unfair and irrational and contains so many errors that judicial review seems an inadequate remedy to redress the wrong perpetrated on an applicant”, you know it’s going to make for horrible reading.
And when it goes on to say the applicant’s counsel acted with “With a degree of admirable restraint” because that counsel only objected to a decision because it was “irrational, unreasonable and reached in error of law, fact and fair procedures”, you get this image of a judge on the High Court who wants to get down off the bench and shove a gavel so far up some minor functionary that they could claim asylum from persecution themselves and gain some actual sympathy for the people they’re meant to be helping.
The applicant here is a doctor who treated Sudanese women who were at the time being raped as a state-sponsored tactic to suppress the local population. He worked with MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] to report this, he had to flee the country as a result, but was tracked down, had his surgery destroyed and was threatened by the Sudanese security forces, and later they came back for him, he ran with the aid of an NGO but was found, abducted, tortured, left for dead on the street afterwards, smuggled out of the country by friends and came here for asylum — and all of this was extensively documented and those documents presented in his asylum application — and then, to quote the High Court, “the only conclusion which the Court could draw for the Tribunal’s decision not to recommend that the applicant should be declared a refugee is that the Tribunal Member simply did not like the applicant.”
Judgement here
Related: The Refugee Appeals Tribunal in 2014 (Liam Thornton, HumanRights.ie)
Previously: Rescuing A Gay Refugee