JUDICIAL REVIEWS of Refugee Appeals Tribunal decisions which are settled without a hearing are costing the taxpayer an estimated €20 million, The Irish Timeshas learned.
Courts Service figures show that 295 High Court challenges to tribunal decisions were settled in 2005 and 358 in 2006.
The figures for 2007 are not yet available, but are unlikely to have fallen, which would bring the total to about 1,000 settlements over the past three years, costing a minimum of €20,000 each.
The number of settlements contrasts with the number of cases where the tribunal won its case in the High Court, which happened in 16 cases in 2005 and 24 in 2006. It lost 11 cases following a full hearing in 2005 and 21 in 2006. The figures are published in the Courts Service annual reports.
The figures also show that interim orders were granted in 152 cases in 2005 and 147 cases in 2006.
Typically such interim orders concern a stay on deportation pending the hearing of the proceedings. A total of 758 applications for judicial review were made in 2005 and 909 in 2006, of which some would still have been in the system at the end of the year.
The total number of appeals going to the tribunal is not publicly available, but is estimated at about 2,000 annually.
According to refugee lawyers, the settlements, which take place on the eve of a hearing, normally involve the case being allocated to a different tribunal member, with the costs of the applicant, or a contribution towards those costs, being paid by the tribunal, along with its own legal costs.
Settling the case amounts to a recognition by the tribunal that it would be unlikely to be successful if it attempted to defend its procedures in a High Court hearing.
The tribunal was asked on Friday morning for the costs of judicial reviews, including those settled and the contributions towards the costs of applicants, for the past three years but no reply had been received by 6.30pm last night.
There is no annual report, which might contain such figures, on its website. However, according to a lawyer specialising in refugee law, each case is likely to cost sums running into five figures for each side.
"This is an area of law involving complex, technical and highly specialised work. In any such area costs are high. I would not be surprised if in cases that go a good way towards hearing, the costs would be in five figures per side. How much is it costing the taxpayer?" she said.
Another lawyer practising in the judicial review area said that a junior counsel would expect between €5,000 and €10,000 for preparing a judicial review and a solicitor about twice that, before ever appearing in court.
Thus each case could be conservatively estimated to cost €15,000 for each side.
The figure could be reduced by paying only a proportion of the costs of the applicant, and by the legal representatives of the tribunal giving a discount for preparing a number of cases. Even with these savings, each case would cost approximately €20,000 to settle.
There were 653 settlements in the two years 2005-2006 and probably well over 300 last year, so the total cost of refugee judicial reviews not defended by the State ran to at least €20 million over the past three years, and possibly a lot more.
Asylum judicial reviews make up the bulk of the judicial review list in the High Court, with 909 such applications in 2006. All other categories of judicial review combined only came to 626 that year, the first year in which they were all categorised separately.
Noeline Blackwell, director of Flac and a former refugee lawyer, said: "I am surprised the Comptroller and Auditor General is not looking at how many cases are settled with costs paid or a contribution paid towards the costs of the applicant."
According to some members of the tribunal, the number of judicial reviews being taken against the tribunal is partly due to the fact that members do not have regular meetings to discuss common principles and procedures, so the quality of the decision-making is not consistent.