THE RIGHT TO BE HEARD IN IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CASES: THE CJEU MOVES TOWARDS A DEFINITION

Original Published HERE on EU LAW ANALYSIS on Friday, 16 January 2015

by Elspeth Guild, Kingsley Napley

An essential element of a legal challenge is the right to be heard. It is often characterised as a component of rights of the defence but it has a wider ambit requiring state authorities to provide an individual with an opportunity to state his or her case before taking a decision. By and large in EU law, the right to be heard has been bundled into national procedural rights but it began to make guest appearances in CJEU judgments from 2008 and recently has taken central stage in two judgments on the Return Directive.

The starting place, however, is in a judgment about post clearance recovery of customs import duties (C-349/07 Sopropé), where the CJEU held that when state authorities take decisions within the scope of EU law they must provide the entity with the right to be heard. This is the case even in the absence of such a procedural requirement in EU law. Two conditions must be fulfilled: the right must be the same as that to which individuals or undertakings in comparable situations under national law are entitled (the principle of equivalence) and secondly the procedural rules must not make it impossible in practice or excessively difficult to exercise the right (the principle of effectiveness). These principles laid out in the 2008 judgment are having a considerable impact on EU law on third country nationals both in the context of asylum and return decisions.

Where does the right to be heard come from?

First, the source of the right: the CJEU found in 2008 (a year before the Charter became legally binding via the Lisbon Treaty) that there was an EU principle of the right to be heard. But note, in subsequent judgments it has been reluctant to embed the right in the Charter. Although the Charter has a right to good administration (Article 41(1)) which includes the right to be heard, the CJEU has held, most recently in two judgments (Mukarubega and Boudjlida, discussed here) on the Return Directive (Directive 2008/115), that this right only applies to the institutions, bodies, offices and agencies of the EU (not to Member State bodies – a finding not entirely consistent with a previous ruling on an asylum matter see below).

So the right to be heard, for instance regarding a residence permit under the Return Directive, cannot be founded on Article 41 Charter. Further, Articles 47 and 48 Charter ensure respect for the rights of the defence and fair legal process in all judicial proceedings, but while the CJEU refers in its recent judgments to these two provisions in conjunction with Article 41, it has not expressly excluded them from applicability to Member State action (as to do so would limit them to really few situations).  Instead, the Court has chosen to determine that the right is inherent in respect for the rights of the defence which is a general principle of EU law (see Boudjlida).

There is an oddity here which the CJEU does not attempt to explain. On the one hand the right to be heard is critical for the individual or entity before the state authority reaches a decision. On the facts of the cases before the CJEU which were about the decisions of a national authority that individuals were unlawfully residing on the territory and therefore the consequence was a return decision (or expulsion order), this matters a lot. The individuals had to have an opportunity to explain why their residence was lawful or why it should be regularised on the basis of their personal circumstances in order to avoid a return decision being pronounced against them.

On the other hand, the rights of the defence apply after the state authority has made its decision and the individual seeks to appeal against it. It may be a ground of the defence that the individual was never provided an opportunity to make his or her case before the decision was reached but this is an ex post argument. It is a stretch of interpretation to push the rights of the defence backwards into an administrative obligation. Further Article 47 Charter, the fair trial provision, applies in respect of any right or freedom guaranteed by EU law. But Article 48 Charter, the rights of the defence, apply when the individual is charged (a criminal charge). There are a number of nuances here regarding the right to be heard.

In MM – an asylum case – the CJEU held that the right to good administration (Article 41 Charter) includes the right of every person to be heard before any individual measure which would affect him or her adversely is taken. It went on to state that Article 41 Charter from its very wording is of general application. On this basis, and also after a consideration of the generally applicable principle of the right to be heard, the CJEU held that an asylum applicant must be heard by the national authorities responsible for determining the claim pursuant also to the rules of the Common European Asylum System. This seems to indicate that in the asylum context the CJEU was tempted to apply Article 41 Charter to national authorities but in the later decisions on the Return Directive it drew back from that position.

Nonetheless, in the Return Directive context (Boudjlida), the CJEU found that the right to be heard guarantees every person the opportunity to make known his or her views effectively during an administrative procedure and before the adoption of any decision liable to affect his or her interests adversely.

What does the right mean?  (continue reading …)