A woman whose family was largely destroyed in a bomb attack when she was 12, was married at 13, and had three children by the time she was 17, has won a High Court challenge over a refusal to allow her children to come from Somalia to reside with her in Ireland.
Mr Justice Anthony Barr said the exceptional circumstances of the woman’s life appeared to have been disregarded by the Minister for Justice’s decision-maker in considering the woman’s application for family reunification.
The findings that she “relinquished her role as the primary caregiver” and that she “elected to move” to Ireland were “particularly harsh” and did not appear to take account of the very significant personal dilemma that faced her when she did so, he said.
He said the court would make orders quashing the April 2022 decision refusing permission of the woman’s four children to join her in Ireland. He said their applications should be sent back for reconsideration by a different decision-maker for the Minister.
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The judge said five of the woman’s seven siblings were killed in a bomb attack on the family home in Somalia in 2009. Another sibling died in 2013, while their father was killed in 2005.
She said she then spent a number of years moving around Somalia, running from the Al Shabab militia. She went to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, moved back to Somalia for some time before returning to Ethiopia in 2015.
She had lost contact with her only remaining sibling, a sister, who had come to Ireland in 2004 as a refugee and later became a naturalised citizen. Their mother came to live in Ireland with her in 2010.
The woman, in the meantime, was married in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 2011 and had her first child aged 13, two others by the time she was 17 and a fourth when she was 19.
In 2014, she said her husband and son were taken hostage in an attack by Al Shabab and they were reunited with her in 2016. She had to again flee from where she was staying in March 2016 at which time she lost contact with her husband and has not heard from him since.
Although she tried to find her sister several times after the bomb attack on her family through the Red Cross tracing service, it was not until 2015 when an old friend got in touch with her sister and gave the sister a contact number for her in Addis Ababa.
The sister applied for family reunification with the woman in 2017 though this was not granted until 2021, following a refusal and judicial review proceedings.
An application was then made for visas to bring her four children here but this was also refused and a legal challenge followed.
She had left her children in Somalia temporarily in the care of her sister-in-law who had five children of her own and things were difficult.
It was argued the refusal of the visas did not take account of the exceptional humanitarian circumstances of the woman.
The Minister opposed the challenge on grounds including that the decision-maker had been perfectly correct to take account of the likely considerable financial burden on the State in the event that visas were granted to the children applicants.
In his decision, Mr Justice Barr said when one reads the refusal as a whole, it was clear that “the decision maker adopted a harsh and in some respects, unfair approach to the applications” for the children.
There was no evidence the decision maker “engaged in a real way with the exceptional circumstances in this case”, he said.