THE EXPRESSION of disquiet by former Supreme Court judge Catherine McGuinness about the lack of transparency in our immigration and asylum system crystallises years of concern about the appeals mechanism involved. People claiming asylum in this State first apply to the Office of Refugee Applications Commissioner (ORAC). Last year Ireland earned the dubious distinction of being the EU member state least likely to grant refugee status at first instance. Almost 99 per cent of applications were rejected compared with an EU average acceptance rate of one in four.
Those whose applications are rejected can appeal to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal (RAT) which turned down 90 per cent of appeals in the last year for which figures are available. The tribunal has been at the centre of controversy on numerous occasions in recent years and faced its biggest challenge in 2007 when the Supreme Court cleared the way for the High Court to examine records and statistics showing the rejection record of its highest-earning member. Alleging his record would show bias, three asylum seekers sought to have their cases heard by someone else. The case was settled by the tribunal before the relevant documents were discovered, and the tribunal member resigned.
The level of rejection of asylum claims has contributed, in turn, to a very high number of judicial review applications against both the ORAC and the RAT, with 749 applications received in 2009. This has placed a heavy burden on the courts and, as Mrs Justice McGuinness pointed out, does not serve the applicants well either. She also expressed concern that because judicial reviews are often settled without a hearing, the legal issues involved are not clarified by the Supreme Court.
The position of people other than asylum seekers who come to Ireland as immigrants is even worse as they have no mechanism to appeal decisions on their status or the right of their families to join them. Their cases are subject to ministerial discretion which gives rise to further judicial review applications.
Against this backdrop, the establishment of an independent and transparent appeals mechanism for refugees and immigrants is long overdue. Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Féin have pledged to reform the immigration and asylum systems and Fine Gael and Labour were heavily critical of it – especially of the RAT – during the debate on the now lapsed Immigration Protection and Residence Bill. This should pave the way for an approriate legislative response by the new government.