An asylum-seeker who claims he was detained in a Romanian orphanage from the age of 11 to 16 and afterwards lived homeless has secured a High Court order preventing his deportation tomorrow.
Mr Justice Kelly yesterday granted Mr Cosmin Foisel (23), of Mayfield Road, Dublin, leave to seek an order quashing a decision of the Minister for Justice to deport him. The leave acts as a stay on the deportation.
In an affidavit, Mr Foisel said when he left the orphanage, aged 16, he was forced to live on the streets, along the canals and in the cellars of the town of Bistrita. He claimed he was regularly beaten with rubber clubs by police and that police dogs were set on him, ripping his clothes. He believed the only reason for the assaults and ill treatment was that he was homeless. He resolved to escape such treatment and fled to Ireland.
When he arrived in December 1996, he applied for refugee status and his application was rejected. He said Mr Peter Finlay (now a senior counsel) heard his appeal against refusal and accepted Mr Foisel's claims of mistreatment.
Despite that, Mr Foisel said Mr Finlay had recommended that the appeal be refused on the grounds that Mr Foisel's well-founded fear of persecution was not a fear of persecution for a Geneva Convention reason (by reason of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group).
Mr Finlay held that "the homeless" was not a particular social group within the meaning of the Geneva Convention.
Mr Foisel said the Department sent him a standard letter stating that the deportation order was made in the interests of public policy, and that the common good in "maintaining the integrity of the asylum and immigration systems outweighs such features of the applicant's case as might tend to support him being granted leave to remain".
He claimed the Department had failed to have proper regard for the length of time he had been in the State, and for the attachments and relationships he had formed.