The Refugee Appeals Tribunal is maintaining its Supreme Court appeal against a High Court judgment that it must publish its rulings, despite its decision to publish some of them yesterday.
The tribunal made public "legally significant" rulings for the first time yesterday. This followed a High Court judgment last year that its decisions should be published.
Minister for Justice Michael McDowell announced earlier this week that the tribunal had established a committee to draw up a system for identifying "legally significant" rulings and publishing them in a way that protected the anonymity of applicants.
Twenty-two decisions were published yesterday, representing applicants from 15 countries. Six of the applications came from Nigeria, and two each from Croatia and Moldova. The rest included applicants from Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Congo Brazzaville, Georgia, Ghana, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Zimbabwe.
Of the decisions published, only two allowed the appeal against the original rejection of the application for asylum, less than 10 per cent. This contrasts with the overall statistics for successful appeals, which were running at over 20 per cent in 2004.
Fifteen members of the tribunal, just under half the total membership, are represented in the rulings published. One of them is barrister James Nicholson. According to statistics compiled by the Refugee Legal Service (RLS) and presented to the High Court recently, he was unknown by the service to have allowed any appeals of the hundreds he heard.
Accordingly, solicitors were refusing to submit appeals to him on the ground of bias. One of the two successful appeals that was published yesterday was a decision favourable to an asylum-seeker by Mr Nicholson.
According to a spokeswoman for the Minister, the appeal against the High Court judgment is going ahead in order to establish the principle that the chairman can exercise his discretion about publishing significant decisions, rather than being obliged to publish all decisions, which, she said, would be administratively difficult.
Meanwhile, Fine Gael has published proposals for reform of the tribunal.
These include reducing the tribunal membership from 35 part-time members to 10 full-time members, five permanent and pensionable and five appointed for a five-year renewable term.
The chairman should be a retired judge or a judge on secondment, rather than a political appointee, according to the party's justice spokesman, Jim O'Keeffe. A body similar to the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board should recommend a short-list of ordinary members to the Minister for appointment.
All decisions should be published, he said, and there should be a strict statutory time limit for the making of decisions. He also proposed an annual quota of 1,000 places for people allowed into Ireland on humanitarian grounds following natural disasters or conflicts.