Court bars deportation of Chile family after birth of child here

Lawyers for a one-week-old baby girl have obtained a High Court order preventing the Department of Justice from deporting her parents, brother and sisters, who are asylum-seekers from Chile.

Mr Justice Shanley yesterday granted a temporary injunction after lawyers for Tara Suarez argued that her constitutional rights to the "company, care and parentage of her parents within a family unit" would be breached if her family was deported.

Tara was born in St Munchin's Hospital, Limerick, last Friday, and therefore qualifies as an Irish citizen. Her parents, Julio and Pamela, live in Ennis, having arrived in Ireland with three children last May.

The couple immediately applied for asylum, but were told by a Department official that because they had arrived here from Britain their application should be made in the UK. That decision was upheld by an asylum appeals commissioner last November.

Both officials cited the Dublin Convention, which sets out standardised procedures for handling asylum cases within the EU and states that asylum-seekers should make their applications in the "first safe country" in the EU in which they arrive.

Lawyers for the family are seeking a judicial review of this ruling, which is to be heard by the High Court next Monday. Last December they wrote to the Department seeking an undertaking that the family would not be deported until the review was completed. The Department refused to give that undertaking.

Yesterday the Department indicated that deportation orders had been sent to gardai in Ennis. When lawyers learned of the birth of the baby they again sought an undertaking from the Department that it would not deport the family. The parents said they wished to remain in the State to care for their daughter, an Irish citizen.

Lawyers for the family told Mr Justice Shanley that any deportation or detention of the girl's family would constitute "a breach of her constitutionally protected rights".

It would also prevent them from exercising their right to assert a choice of residence on behalf of their child.

Granting a temporary injunction restraining the Department from deporting the family, Mr Justice Shanley referred to a Supreme Court decision in 1990 which established the right of asylum-seekers to remain in the State to care for their Irish-born child.

The case comes up again early next month.