The man alleged to be one of the foremost supporters of Islamic State in the jurisdiction has been deported to Jordan.
The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was taken into custody on Monday night, after the High Court had refused to allow him leave to bring an appeal to the Court of Appeal. He was taken from Cloverhill Prison at midday Wednesday and was deported from Dublin Airport later that evening. It is understood he left on a chartered plane rather than on a scheduled flight.
His solicitors, KRW Law, Belfast, made last-minute approaches to the Supreme Court and to the European Court of Human Rights, but were unable to prevent the deportation going ahead.
In proceedings before the courts the man has claimed he was tortured in Jordan during the 1990s and faced being tortured there again if returned.
Torture claims
However, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys, in a ruling last month, said it was not a case where a person who had been tortured was being deported to face further torture. Rather, he said, it was a case where the man had failed to persuade the Minister for Justice “either of the veracity of his account of previous ill-treatment or of a real risk of future ill-treatment”. The Minister had weighed up the man’s claims and the man had failed to show the Minister’s decision was unreasonable or any illegality in her assessment.
The State said the man was the foremost organiser and facilitator of travel by extremists prepared to undertake violent action on behalf of Isis and its “main recruiter” in Ireland. The man, who had lived here since 2000, denied the claims. He denied he had consulted with violent extremist leaders outside Ireland, represented a threat to national security or had recruited for Islamic extremist groups.
Permission to appeal
Amnesty International
, in a statement in the wake of the decision to deny him permission to appeal but before his actual deportation, said sending him to Jordan would “place him at real risk of torture and other serious human rights violations, and was a worrying sign of backsliding on the absolute ban on torture”.
“International law prohibits Ireland from returning anyone to a country where they would be at real risk of torture or other serious human rights violations. It’s a very bad day for human rights when a government tries to send someone back to a country they know he will almost certainly be tortured in,” said Colm O’Gorman, executive director of Amnesty International Ireland.
