A recent documentary “The Irish
Asylum Seekers Scandal” cited a “complex legal system” as
responsible for keeping refugees waiting years, even a decade, in
legal limbo.
Yet few realize that refugees who win
judicial review in the Irish courts, are not then permitted to get on
with their lives. They are forced to plead in a lower court again,
sometimes over and over, for years on end. Only when they lose, does
the process end.
Isn't that illegal? One might well
ask. Yes, in almost every other type of case. The courts would not
allow it to be done to the worst criminal in Ireland. It's only for
refugees: only for crime victims.
But how do refugees get to the courts?
Why is the asylum section of the courts so slow?
The High Court is glutted with the
handiwork of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal (the aptly-tagged RAT): an assembly line of continual flawed decisions.
Albeit only a fraction of the destitute crime victims, pleading there
for their lives, can ever hope to challenge them. RAT over-burdens
the courts with a continual flood of judicial reviews.
This also, inhibits justice for
refugees: who are frequently told by judges that the court doesn't
have the time to give their cases the attention they deserve.
Superior Courts judges, who are
responsible to oversee the entire courts system, have chosen to
permit this to go on. Although RAT is not even a real court.
RAT is a “quasi-judicial tribunal”.
In allowing such tribunals, the Constitution expressly prohibits
them from dealing with any matter of human life or freedom.
Yet that is the “quasi-” body that
decides all matters of life and death in asylum appeals.
The only requirement to sit in
judgement on RAT is to be a practicing solicitor. In contravention
to UN criteria, no special training or education in refugee issues is
required.
Challenges by the legal profession has
proved RAT to be little more than a kangaroo court indeed.
It's the Justice Ministry who hires the
solicitors, to act as RAT judges. They're hired to review asylum
decisions, made by the Justice Ministry. That Ministry can hire and
fire them at will. So there is no real division between the
decision-maker and the appeal to the decision.
Investigators also found that cases
were being distributed to the RAT members who most often confirmed
the Justice Ministry's decisions. A third of all cases were given to
just one member: who refused asylum 98% of the time.
In a hand-slap intervention by the
courts, the member was forced to resign. Nothing was done to change
the system, or to challenge the Justice Ministry, who ran it.
Later on, an asylum applicant took her
case to the Superior Courts, with evidence that the same abuses by
RAT were still going on. This included a Constitutional challenge to
sections of the asylum law, which defined RAT's unfair structure.
High Court and Supreme Court judges
refused to hear the case. One of these judges was Mr Niall Fennelly.
In violation of the Constitution, the
State has never answered that Complaint.
When notified of her corruption
Complaint against judges (implicating the Justice Ministry,)
then-Justice Minister Shatter ordered the Plaintiff to leave the
country (in violation of international law.)
This Plaintiff then became the first to
report corruption in Minister Shatter.
Later, Minister Shatter was forced to
resign in another corruption scandal.
He suggested a judge should investigate
the matter.
The judge chosen was ... you guessed
... Niall Fennelly.
When corruption in the highest judges
goes unchallenged,
all affected courts are in danger of
becoming kangaroo courts.
