Two members of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal have resigned, citing dissatisfaction with the manner in which it is run by its chairman, John Ryan, The Irish Times has learned. Carol Coulter, Legal Affairs Correspondent reports.
It is understood Mr Ryan has responded to these resignation letters by accusing their authors of defamation.
Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform Michael McDowell received the letters, also sent to Mr Ryan, from barristers Sunniva McDonagh and Doreen Shivnan before Christmas.
These developments come some months after the Refugee Appeals Tribunal has been criticised by the High Court for its lack of transparency. In a major judgment delivered last July, Mr Justice McMenamin ruled it was wrong to refuse lawyers for asylum applicants access to its previous decisions.
In his reserved judgment, he said this position was "unique in the common law jurisdictions" and it "cannot accord with the principles of natural and constitutional justice, fairness of procedure or equality of arms".
Although a High Court declaration is normally followed as it is regarded as mandatory, this judgment has been appealed to the Supreme Court and no decisions have as yet been published.
The refusal of the tribunal to publish decisions has been criticised by Ms McDonagh in the Bar Review. Last year, she wrote the publication of decisions would allow for a consensus about best practices to emerge and would reveal inconsistencies that existed.
"Publication . . . would allow for analysis as to whether any such discrepancies . . . are accounted for by the different mix of cases allocated to members or are due to other factors," she wrote.
Ms McDonagh also expressed concern in her article about how unaccompanied minors are handled in the asylum system.
Allegations of inconsistencies in the decisions of the tribunal have been rife for many years.
According to a report by Catherine Kenny of the Human Rights Centre in Galway, published three years ago, only 13 per cent of lawyers appearing before it considered there was consistency between the recommendations of its different members.
Some commented that outcomes of appeals were more dependent on the identity of the member hearing the case than on its merits.
The tribunal has consistently refused to publish statistics for the decisions of different members of the tribunal, but statistics compiled over a year ago by the Refugee Legal Service showed that one member, barrister James Nicholson, heard more than 400 cases and rejected over 95 per cent of them.
About one in four appeals to the tribunal were successful.