A WOMAN and her Irish-born son have secured leave to challenge deportation orders made against both of them by the Minister for Justice.
Janet Daniel Sunny, originally from Nigeria, who has been in Ireland since October 2008, and her son Peter, who was born in January 2009, have challenged the deportation orders of February 2010.
Ms Sunny said she feared for her life and that of her son if she returned to Nigeria because her father disapproved of her marriage to a Christian.
She said she married her husband on May 12th, 2006, and became pregnant some time later. While her father initially accepted the news, he subsequently gave her a drink that caused her to suffer a miscarriage, she said.
She said her father would come to her house at a later stage and threaten her and her husband. She fled to a relative’s house, she said, where she was approached by a man who said he had been paid by her father to kill her and her husband if she did not return to her father’s home.
She later became pregnant again, fled the country and went to Italy before coming to Ireland, it was claimed. Ms Sunny was in fear of of being killed by her father and also feared her son would be killed by his grandfather.
The Refugee Appeals Tribunal had concluded Ms Sunny and her child’s father could reclocate internally in Nigeria and rejected her account on credibility grounds, and the Minister later made the deportation order.
Mr Justice Daniel O’Keeffe said neither the file note on the case nor the Minister’s order disclosed the basis upon which the woman’s complaints about fear of persecution in Nigeria were rejected.
The Minister had not disclosed whether he believed the woman’s account or not and had also failed to set out his views regarding the extent or the existence of the risk of ill-treatment.
The Minister had also not set out whether he believed the woman was subject to the risk and, if not, why not.
The Minister was obliged to state why he concluded the return of the woman would not infringe section 5 of the 1996 Act, the judge said. Those failures constituted substantial grounds for judicial review, he said.