LAST UPDATE | 24 Mar

THE SUPREME COURT has heard that asylum seekers are a “uniquely vulnerable class of people” whose rights the State has an obligation to meet upon their arrival to Ireland.

The court began hearing opening submissions in an ongoing case taken by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) against the State today.

The Minister For Children, Equality, Disability, Integration – which previously dealt with asylum seekers – the State, and Attorney General Rossa Fanning are listed as defendants in the case.

The commission first brought proceedings in 2024 to obtain a declaration that the State failed to adequately provide asylum seekers with shelter, food and access to basic hygiene facilities on top of a weekly allowance.

It claimed that the State failed to do so in the case of 2,807 people who have arrived in Ireland since the case was first lodged with the court in December 2023.

It has argued that the State is breaching the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Irish Constitution. 

The case was brought after the government ran out of public accommodation for asylum seekers in 2023, and increased payments and provided temporary shelter, such as tents, to those who arrived by themselves and were without housing.

At the time, tents were set up in places like Grand Canal in Dublin, the cost of preventing which reached almost €800,000.

In 2024, the High Court ruled that the State had breached the human rights of 2,807 male international protection applicants by failing to provide them with accommodation.

However, the Court of Appeal overturned that ruling last year, saying that the IHREC had not proved that the physical or mental health of IP applicants was undermined “in a state of degradation incompatible with human dignity”.

In the overturning of the decision, the court accepted that people seeking international protection in Ireland could be classified as being in extreme material poverty, because of testimony from 13 asylum seekers who claimed the lack of services had an impact on their health.

However, the court disagreed that the group’s health issues were representative of all international protection applicants who had similarly not been offered services.

On the first day of an appeal brought against the Court of Appeal’s ruling, senior counsel for IHREC Eoin McCullough told the court that the entire group could still be defined as one because their rights had been breached in the first instance.

He argued that the “commonality” between the 2,807 people was that they all had their rights infringed, because they had arrived in the State and were not provided with their basic needs.

McCullagh referred to affidavits sworn by 11 asylum seekers that were filed when the case was first brought, saying that they showed how the human rights of the entire group were being breached through the State’s failure to provide them with shelter.

He said this was the case even when a person arrived seeking international protection and could find shelter in a mosque, or relied on friends to accommodate them where the State was unable to do so.

“The inference that one draws from the evidence is that there was nobody whose basic needs were met,” he told the court.

McCullagh told the court that the State had therefore breached the rights of a “uniquely vulnerable class of people”.

He said this was because when asylum seekers arrive in Ireland, they are unlikely to have a support network, they are arriving on the basis that they have likely been subject to persecution in their home country, and because they are not entitled to work here.

He argued that the Court of Appeal had incorrectly applied a two-part test in finding whether their rights as a group had been breached.

The first part was that the asylum seekers were left in “extreme material poverty” upon their arrival in Ireland; the second part was whether this had undermined their physical and mental health in a way that impacted their right to human dignity.

But McCullough argued that regardless of the impact on the physical and mental health, the State had breached Article 1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union by failing to offer them “material reception conditions”.

He also said that human dignity “is inviolable” and is something that “must be respected and protected”. 

However, in opening submissions this afternoon, counsel for the State argued that the concept of human dignity is not a right under the charter, but is referred to as a value or a principle in the Treaty of the European Union.

“It doesn’t say everyone has the right to human dignity,” counsel told the court. 

Asked whether an individual can claim that the State has failed to protect and respect their human right to dignity, counsel responded: “The issue is, if it’s a right, what does it actually mean? Can a right be defined on a contextual basis only?” 

The case continues tomorrow.